


Something in You I Believe In

by addictedtostorytelling



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2018-07-25 11:09:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 89,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7530340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/addictedtostorytelling/pseuds/addictedtostorytelling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set between episodes 04x23 "Bloodlines" and 06x24 "Way to Go." The story of how Grissom and Sara become a couple in Las Vegas. Canon compliant. </p><p>"This year, things have been so different between her and Grissom. Mostly, she swears he wants nothing to do with her, but then there are times when she knows better, when they get close to each other, and the way he looks at her could burn her to the ground. There’s what he said, wrapping the Marlin case—what she overheard him say, from the observation deck. There are times when she thinks that if she said the right words to him, she could burn him to the ground, too."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes place within a larger alternate universe, which is canon compliant up to the events of episode 08x01 "Dead Doll" but starts to diverge from there. Since this story takes place during Seasons Four, Five, and Six, it still fits the CSI canon of the time.
> 
> Special thanks to songlyricsincludingthewordfjord on tumblr for all her help with the details.

**First Prelude**

_They meet, and instantly it’s love. He’s brilliant. She’s brilliant. They suit each other perfectly, never mind the fifteen years between them. She moves from San Francisco to Las Vegas to be near him, and he’s glad. Neither one of them is impulsive or believes that romance should necessarily lead to marriage, but they impulsively get married, and it is one of those rare spur-of-the-moment decisions that turns out better than anyone could have anticipated. Despite some department red tape, they end up working together, the same job on the same shift. They’re a package deal. Spousal hires. They go home together after they wrap their cases, and neither one of them is lonely. Their sex life is fulfilling. Their condo is well-furnished. They have great communication. Maybe at some point they have a child. Move to a bigger place. Get new jobs, somewhere far away. Live happily ever after._

_Except._

_That’s not how this story goes._

_They meet, and instantly it’s love. He’s brilliant. She’s brilliant. But they draw things out. Commitment issues. He visits her in San Francisco. She writes him letters when he goes home to Vegas. Two years pass. Eventually, she moves to his city. They don’t get married. Instead, he realizes how foolish he is: an old man who’s fallen in love with someone fifteen years younger than he. In this story, he’s her boss. There are rules about situations like theirs, so he cools things off. The problem is that they’re still in love, and she doesn’t understand what she’s done wrong. She waits for him, at times helplessly. But eventually she tires of his prolonged hesitation. It’s been two years since she’s had sex with anyone, and now she’s in her thirties, and she’s done with putting her life on hold, forever paused for him. She finds a man her own age. She dates him. Has sex with him. Her boss languishes. Working together becomes both complicated and insufferable. She breaks up with her boyfriend for reasons that have nothing to do with her boss but also everything to do with him. She still loves her boss. He still loves her. She asks her boss to just try to be with her, never mind if it’s undignified, asking. But he’s convinced he’s bad for her, and he’s scared that if he allows himself to want her, she’ll someday realize that she’s made a mistake, and then she’ll leave him alone and brokenhearted. He turns her down, and she feels like nothing will ever go right for her again. They say nothing to each other after their exchange. Months pass, and they’re miserable._

_That’s the start of this story._

_The ending is the same._

**Second Prelude**

_The theory goes that the universe began with a bang, but theirs ended with one—or at least that’s what they both feel now, twelve months later._

_Things had been strange between them for a long time, but they had still had their bond, and, recently, he’d been incredibly sweet, and she’d been, as she once was, charmed. She was unattached again. Available. He seemed interested._

_But then the air in the hallway flared with heat, crackled, and ignited in a roar. She was closest to the explosion, so suddenly she was off her feet, airborne in a shower of glass, searing butane, twisted metal, and sparks, and then blanketed by a gray layer of dust, like a Roman noblewoman beneath Vesuvius, once she hit ground. He was farther away from the epicenter of the blast, protected by the walls of his office, but he still felt a quake all the way through him and heard more than he had heard in months, his insides shaken to their foundations, even down to the small, sclerosed bones in his ears._

_Maybe that bang should have been a new start for them, but instead it collapsed their universe. She asked him a question he couldn’t answer. His nonresponse put her off. They fissured in a way that they never had before. Went spiraling off to separate corners of their cosmos._

_One year later, she’s in a bar, drinking by herself after shift. He’s still at work, though he could have already gone home. They are chaos in the primordial sense._

_Decreated._

_Waiting._

**I.**

Grissom doesn’t register anything after the officer says to him _She’s all right_. He hangs up the phone, leaves his office, and walks the block to PD, all on autopilot. The officer meets him at the front desk. A voice—his voice—thanks the officer for the courtesy—for letting her off with only a verbal warning—but he may as well hear the words as if a stranger speaks them to him from several yards away or as if he were underwater with surf tossing overhead. Like a momentary recurrence of his otosclerosis.

Only when the officer takes leave does he dare to look into the room, to search Sara out beneath the dimmed down lights, among so many empty chairs. She remains still, and he goes to her, his steps shuffling and slow, though his heart beats quickly and his breath runs short. He sits beside her, and she doesn’t look at him, just steels herself, worrying her hands, bracing for whatever she thinks will come next.

All year, she has worn black, as if she were in mourning, and today even her lipstick is a dark and bruising burgundy. He hadn’t realized before, but lately her face has thinned, her beauty become more severe.

Everything registers all at once, and pain shivs between his ribs.

He should probably say something to her about poor judgment and consequences, about her job, disciplinary actions, about how she should have called a cab or called him or called anyone. He should probably remind her that she could have killed someone else or herself been killed.

Instead, he thinks about how, on his worst nights, he looks up at the stars and feels infinitesimal and cold, like he is just some minimal sum of sentient carbon in a vast and endless universe.

In his younger years, Grissom believed that he was never lonely, but he was wrong. These days, he knows that he was lonely all along and only ignoring the dull, persistent hurt. In this moment, he believes that loneliness is a better approximation of hell than burning. He wouldn’t wish true and total loneliness on his enemies, much less on someone he—

He thinks back to that case from the beginning of the year: to the girl and her glass butterflies; to his ambling but honest confession to the surgeon; to how helpless he felt, not just because they couldn’t prove guilt, but because he is a coward who hesitates and never acts, and because there is something lowdown and dark in his nature, something that makes him sick to look at.

His chest aches, and he imagines his ribcage as if it were the crumbling arch in an ancient cathedral. He doesn’t want Sara to feel alone. He is grateful that she is alive but also overwhelmingly sad for her. He wants to take her in his arms, to hold her tight and kiss her hair. He wants her so close to him that she can feel his breathing and his bones beneath his skin—so that she can know that he is real, and he is with her.

Present.

Instead, he reaches out and slips his hand over hers, so that—just for a moment—they are warm and together.

It’s all he can do nowadays.

“C’mon,” he says. “I’ll take you home.”

They rise, still hand-in-hand, and she follows him out of the room.

They’re halfway down the hall when she mutters, “I’m sorry.”

He almost tells her that he’s sorry, too.

They’ve known each other for six years now, but this morning marks the first time that Grissom has ever seen Sara after she’s been drinking. The thought comes to him unbidden: Always know what kind of drunk a person is before you set up house together. It’s something Catherine once told him—a lesson she learned the hard way with Eddie. Grissom doesn’t think that Sara is drunk now, not when she was barely over the limit, and the officer stopped her more than an hour ago. But the thought still holds. Somehow, he hadn’t imagined that she would be so quiet, drunk. So sad. Like statuary in a graveyard.

He starts to wonder how different she might seem if they were together at a bar ordering drinks or if they were sitting on the couch, sharing a bottle of wine, having a movie date night, her legs slung over his lap, the dog on the floor beside them. But he stops himself.

He doesn’t have the right.  

If Sara had been charged with the DUI, then the officer would have had no choice but to impound her car. As is, he had his rookie drive it back to CSI and park it in the employee lot. He gave the keys to Grissom to return to her when she sobered up. Grissom makes sure to pass the car in the lot so that she can see it and know that she won’t have to pay an impound fee.

By now, the sun has risen, and the morning is all soft light and desert haze, foreshortened shadows at odd angles, stunted on the ground.

In San Francisco, Grissom and Sara used to hang all over each other: his arm draped across her shoulders or wrapped comfortably around her waist; her hands roaming him in down moments, sometimes burrowing in the pockets of his jacket while he was still wearing it; other times, as they kissed, gently holding him at the back of his neck where his hair meets his spine; or else linking to his hands in creative, insistent holds, tethering them to each other, making them a pair.

Grissom hasn’t ever held Sara’s hand like this in Las Vegas. Since she moved here, he has rarely allowed himself to touch her in any telling way—not like how he has wanted to. On occasion, he has walked with her arm-in-arm at crime scenes but only briefly and usually when they were alone, where no one could potentially see them: a momentary indulgence.

Clinging to her like this, openly and in the parking lot at work, is something new. His fingers weave between hers, and he keeps her close to him. He doesn’t want to let go of her even once they reach his car.

She’s the one to break the hold, stepping aside to allow him to unlock the door.

“I could call a cab,” she offers, looking at the pavement. “You don’t have to do this.”

“I know,” Grissom says.

He opens her door and offers her his hand again, allowing her to use him as an anchor, settling into the passenger seat. She doesn’t seem at all unstable, but she accepts his help anyway. He closes the door behind her. Through the window, he sees her sigh.

Taking the driver’s seat, he thinks back on their previous shift—on how she had been so subdued and unengaged to start out but had perked up later on, suddenly excited about the case. He had convinced himself that they were fine, that she was fine. But nothing has been fine for a while now. What he mistook in her for excitement was actually desperation, a kind of hollow giddiness that comes from living close to an edge.

He has been worried about her for weeks, seeing something low and troubled in her without knowing either what it was or how deep it ran. He tried to suggest that she should take a vacation, but she was wry with him—glib, even. She asked him how many times he’s ever taken a vacation, and what could he say in response? Never. He hasn’t. He doesn’t. Not since she moved to Las Vegas. They’re the same that way, both married to their work, always at the lab.

CSIs are all to some extent workaholics, but everyone on the team knows that Grissom and Sara are in a class of their own. Both of them invariably use up their overtime each month. Both of them will respond to any callout, no matter the hour or how little sleep they’re running on or if they were supposed to have the day off. Everyone else has other responsibilities and connections—Catherine, Lindsey; Nick, his extended family; Warrick, his neighborhood and wider community—but they have nothing but their careers.

In some ways, it’s a codependency between them and their jobs, and Grissom is built for that life, but Sara isn’t. She forces herself to subsist on career ambitions alone, pushing down her natural need for socialization. For her, working so much isn’t either sustainable or healthy.

Grissom thought maybe that if he could get her to take a break—even just for a few days—he could prevent her from burning out. But now he understands: Burnout was never the worst outcome for her. That low trouble in her is like a sinkhole, much deeper than it appears from the surface, almost subterranean, running all the way down to her quick.    

For a moment, he waits, wondering if Sara will say something to him, now that they’re alone in the car together, but she maintains her silence and keeps her face turned away from him, so he starts the car and drives.

When she first moved to Las Vegas from San Francisco, Grissom helped her to find an apartment. She hadn’t known anyone else in town, and they were—well, whatever they were back then. He hadn’t wanted her to end up in a bad neighborhood or to get scammed by a shady landlord. He made sure she rented a nice place, one close to the lab, affordable, and safe.

Since then, she has learned the city for herself, and they’ve drifted apart. She’s moved twice. Grissom has never visited her newest place, but he knows where it is—has her address memorized. He wonders if it surprises her that he knows where to go, though he hasn’t ever been there and she hasn’t given him directions. He suspects not.

They’ve always known too much about each other to be whatever it is that they are now.

Sara rests her forehead on the passenger side window and looks at anything but him. Her breath fogs the glass, creating a patch of gray condensation beside her lips: a translucent, wetter ring surrounded by a dark outer circle. She looks like winter though it is spring.

Grissom should probably tell her that he’s worried and that he feels helpless and scared, watching her run herself into the ground. He should probably be honest for once, because honesty is the only thing he has to offer her now. He should probably say that, contrary to what she might believe, he cares about what happens in her life. That he always has. That she might think no one’s noticed, but he sees her struggling. That he wants to help, but he doesn’t know how. That he never knows what to do when it comes to her.

The words make it to his throat but lodge there like jagged glass. In another world, he could stop the car and kiss what he means to say onto her lips and breathe it against her skin. In this world, he glances at the rearview mirror and sees that she has pinched the bridge her nose between her fingers. She closes her eyes, staving off a headache. He turns onto the street where she lives—Bonanza—and he is suddenly out of time. They’re at her complex, and he’s parking the car and turning off the engine.

For the first time since they left the parking lot at the lab, Sara looks at him.

“If you park your car here, they’ll tow you,” she warns.

By now, it is almost six o’clock and bright outside. It’s still early enough in May that the morning air carries a chill. Grissom offers his hand to Sara as she exits the car, but, this time, she avoids him, shoving her hands into her jacket pockets and shivering. She’s back to not looking at him again.

They cross the parking lot in silence and step onto to complex grounds, him following right behind her. She leads him to the foot of the stairs at her building—first one on the left. One of her neighbors is coming down, carrying his bicycle with him, and they pause to let him by.

Even once he’s passed, Sara doesn’t immediately start moving again. She waits, her eyes trained on the ground. She licks her lips. Swallows hard. Grissom wants to tell her it’s all right, but he also doesn’t want to be wrong or to lie to her. Briefly, he hesitates, but then he sets his hand on the small of her back, shepherding her on.

They’re silent, going up the stairs together, maybe both remembering occasions when he has brought her home before.

He still thinks of this apartment as her new place, though he knows that she moved at the beginning of this year and has lived here five months. The complex is neither terrible nor great. The stale scent of cigarette smoke clings to the brickwork going up the stairwell, but the property is well-kempt, with clean concrete walkways and some landscaping around the manager’s office.

Though he shouldn’t, Grissom wonders what made Sara choose to rent here: if she had help apartment-hunting and moving; if anyone threw her a housewarming party; if she has gotten to know her neighbors; then, if she has ever given someone else keys to this apartment—not her medic, because they had broken up before she moved, but maybe someone else, someone whose name Grissom will never learn. He feels a winch in his chest.

He has no right to be curious.

When they reach her door, Sara glances at Grissom’s face, and he is surprised to see fear in her eyes: bright and frenetic. She looks like a doe in the moment when it decides whether to bolt across the road or remain motionless on the centerline, staring down the headlights. He doesn’t know how to respond. Sara has never been afraid of him before. He flusters and barely manages to produce her keys from his jacket pocket—to give them to her, a sign that he means no harm.

“Take a cab to work tomorrow,” he instructs, pressing the token into her hand. “You can pick up your car at PD.”

She gapes. “You want me to come in tomorrow? I’m not, uh—?”

_Suspended._

_Fired._

She doesn’t say the words, but he hears them in her hesitation and suddenly knows what she is afraid of. He asks himself: How can she think he would ever fire her? But then he answers himself: He has spent the last year, ever since the explosion at the lab, ever since she came to him asking for something that he couldn’t give her, trying to prove to himself that he could manage her impartially; be professional in her presence; act as her supervisor only; become the person who could fire her, if it ever came to that, if he ever needed to. That’s who he is supposed to be. He never managed to convince himself, but he convinced her, apparently.

Another ache cuts through his chest, this time like a bone saw.  

He nods. “We’re, uh, going to figure something out. Informally. But, uh, you have your job.”

_You have me._

He wants her to understand how much he cares for her, but she looks at him as if he were a book in a language she didn’t know how to read—as if his words were inexplicable, a mystery. She once called him from San Francisco after a long night spent working a hard case and said _Can you just talk?_ So he talked. She once called him from San Francisco when she needed his expertise for a trial and said _Can you come?_ So he came. The only reason she doubts him now is because he gave her reason to. He hates her looking at him as if he is half a stranger to her. He hates that the strangeness between them is his fault.

When he and Sara first met each other, they stayed out talking until three in the morning, and he told her more about himself then than he had ever told anyone before or has told anyone since. He was like the sea, and his words were like tides, and she was the shore, catching each one, gathering them to herself. The city lights spangled the bright of her eyes, and she leaned in so close to him, not to hear him better but to be with him in his telling, to make sure he knew that in the unfolding of his stories, she was there with him.

Present.

As they finally parted ways for the night, he kissed her hand, though he had already longed to kiss her in other, better ways. He had never wanted anyone to know everything about him before, but he had wanted that with her.

He still wants it, though he shouldn’t.

He considers a more recent occasion and how he felt standing face-to-face with Sara, so close to her that he could see the differing strains of dark in her irises, like unmixed bitters swirled in the bottom of a glass. They were reenacting a crime, their bodies pressed up against a backdrop of bloodied sheets hung on the lab wall. His hands clasped around her wrists, his heat laid over her heat, and he wanted her so badly that even now, months later, her expression in that moment sometimes still appears to him before he sleeps, seared into his memories like a firebrand.  

If they had allowed themselves just a moment longer, stayed that way, she would have held him at the back of his neck, where his hair meets his spine, he’s sure, he’s sure, he’s sure.

Now, the something inside him aches like an open wound, and before he can second-guess himself, he takes her free hand and stoops into a bow, pressing his lips to her knuckles. Her skin is still cold from the outdoors, clean and dry from the latex gloves of their nightly work. He lingers in the kiss, only breaking away after a few seconds.

“Get some rest,” he advises her, rising.

He doesn’t dare meet her eyes.

If he were brave enough to wait, she would probably say something to him—ask him what he’s doing, what they’re doing, what all this means. But he is such a coward when it comes to her. He leaves quickly, before she can respond, his pulse pounding in his ears as he descends the stairs and hurries across the complex grounds. When he reaches his car, his chest still aches. He never says or does the right thing with her anymore. There are a thousand words he probably should have said, and he can only hope she understands.

He never, ever meant for her to feel alone.


	2. Chapter 2

**II.**

Sara should go to sleep. She pulled a double working the Parker case and then stayed out all night afterwards drinking. Considering that she still has her job, she’ll have to be back at the lab again later tonight. She needs to get some clarity. Pull herself together. Rest.

But she can still feel Grissom’s kiss on the back of her hand, and it is keeping her awake.

Her room is dark, with the windows shuttered and drapes drawn. She lies in bed, fully clothed, still wearing her jacket and scarf, clutching her wrist, her hand—his kiss—held over her heart. If she couldn’t still feel the residual warmth of his lips across her knuckles, she would think that she had imagined everything. He didn’t suspend her. He didn’t fire her. He kissed her hand, the same way he did when they first met, as if he were Prince Charming. Her heart beats on butterfly wings.

“I’m drunk,” she says aloud, but she knows she isn’t, not anymore.

This year, things have been so different between her and Grissom. Mostly, she swears he wants nothing to do with her, but then there are times when she knows better, when they get close to each other, and the way he looks at her could burn her to the ground. There’s what he said, wrapping the Marlin case—what she overheard him say, from the observation deck. There are times when she thinks that if she said the right words to him, she could burn him to the ground, too.

She keeps going back to that day eight months ago, to the twin scents of dried blood and dried wax, ferruginous and esterified; his grasp closed round her wrists; his hips lined to her hips; his breath hot against the shell of her ear, the way it used to be just before he’d suck over her pulse point. In that moment, they were reenacting a crime, yes, but he was right there with her. He can try to deny it all he likes, but she could see the blue in his eyes hot like the heart of a high flame, and she felt the physical effect she had on him, brushing past him, stopping the moment.

Even now, months later, there’s this corporeal draw between them: they stand too close together and trade touches that would be incidental except they’re plainly not. She’s not imagining it, and she isn’t always the instigator. He wants as much as she does. More sometimes, she thinks.

That’s why she can’t understand his brusqueness, all his curt answers and blow-offs. She knows there are department rules, but those rules existed when he asked her to move to Vegas for him, and he didn’t care back then—not for those first few weeks.

She has been so lonely without him.

Not that they’ve socialized much, since she’s settled in. But at least at first, during that initial year, he would sometimes stand outside with her after shift and talk to her in the parking lot, waiting out the sunrise, leaned against the hoods of their cars. Even in subsequent years, there were hours and days where he would seem himself, like the man she knew in San Francisco, joking with her and quoting poetry. Those days, he was artless and brilliant, and she burned for him not like arson but like a pleasant glow. Things changed when she dated Hank, and the change itself didn’t surprise her—just its suddenness, like a door slammed in her face; just the fact that things didn’t change back to the way they had been before, even after she and Hank broke up.

Grissom hasn’t forgiven her, even though over a year has passed.

Maybe the kiss is his forgiveness.

Maybe it’s not.

Sara can hardly think straight.

In her memories, she is walking the beachfront with him after dark, all wrapped up in tule fog and the heady saline scent of the waves. She’s remembering how he escorted her all the way back to her front door, how they parted under her porchlights with that exact same kiss across the hand. Back then, the kiss was the perfect ending to a strangely perfect day—to a story that seemed like the kind of thing that would happen to someone else but had actually happened to her.

She hadn’t been able to sleep then, either.

He probably doesn’t even remember kissing her hand that night, not when subsequent nights gave them more adventurous kisses, working lips and gasping breaths, his hand up her skirt, their bodies flush together, rocking, until they were both ecstatic together in the darkness.

She has always remembered the kiss, but that’s because she had always hoped—naïvely—that one day Grissom might be her happy ending. She hadn’t anticipated that, six years later, he’d be bailing her out of a DUI and everything between them would be so strained.

He has been objectively awful to her, these last few months: mostly petty and dismissive but then at times also bafflingly sincere, which makes it all worse and more confusing. Some days, he’s pulling her off career cases, sending her away on trash runs and gimme tasks, talking down to her as if she were a spoiled child in need of discipline. Other days, he’s taking her with him on leisurely promenades around their crime scenes, praising her with effortless compliments both in company and one-on-one, playing their old trivia game, smiling at her during quiet moments. She almost wishes he would always blow her off—then it might be easier for her to finally collect herself and move on.

If she had girl friends she could vent to, they’d be telling her he wasn’t worth it, that he’s too old to be playing games with her like this, and she’s too old to be caught up in them.

She isn’t stupid. She understands she shouldn’t still want him, not after everything that’s happened, not after he turned her down. But there’s what she understands on a logical level, and then there’s what she feels, and she has always had a problem with wanting things she shouldn’t want—that she’ll never be able to have.

So here she is: pressing her hand to her heart in the dark and feeling it beat for Gil Grissom.

Sometimes she is such an idiot.

She remains motionless for an hour, maybe two. Eventually, she peels herself off the mattress, changes into pajamas, and brushes her teeth. She moves slowly and is numb. She hasn’t yet fully comprehended the stupidity of her actions, but she knows she will soon. She’ll feel so ashamed.

For a long time, she fidgets in bed, unable to drift off. In the end, only shallow, fitful sleep comes to her, more exhausting than restful, choppy like a tempest sea. She wakes twenty minutes before her alarm and lies in bed, thinking. Maybe she should just quit, never mind Grissom’s clemency. She is coming up on her fourth year in Vegas, about to tie her record for the longest time she has ever spent working in the same place at the same job. She has been a nomad since she was nine years old, and she has cutting and running down to a science. Maybe what she needs is a fresh start.

For a while, she had thought she was putting down roots here, making friends of a sort she had never had before, but now she thinks she got that part wrong—that she overestimated her attachments.

She has always known that, when it comes to how other people affect her, her skin is paper-thin, and the lightest touch can break it until she bleeds and bleeds and bleeds. That’s why it’s her habit to remain at a remove, to keep herself safe and intact. She tries to be wry and smart and helpful when she can, but she knows it isn’t enough. Showing her best superficial qualities doesn’t count for much if she never shows anyone anything deeper.

Inevitably, she feels like she’s revealing so much, like she’s being more herself than she has been before, but the people she’s trying to impress only feel that she’s withholding. No matter how many hours she spends with them, no matter how many of her actions they see, they never really know her—not when she won’t say a word about her family or where she’s from or how she grew up or talk about any of her formative experiences; not when she can’t tell them any of the little things that comprise her as a person.

It’s like she appeared in the world, fully-formed as a twentysomething graduate student, having never existed before; like she came out of the ether, ex nihilo; like she has no stories. Everyone else has this cast of characters populating their lives: Greg’s quirky Norwegian grandparents, Nick’s cowboy brothers and his father the honorable judge, Catherine’s pedigree of Las Vegas royalty and wide social circle of strip club riffraff, Warrick’s rowdy WLVU boys. Even Grissom has his old mentors, his who’s who of entomologists and criminalists. But she has no one and can speak to no one. She’s lonely, and they’re left wondering, but she doesn’t know how to say more than she’s said. There’s never a moment for it, and the words never come.

Competing with Nick for the promotion, she heard the whispers around the lab: he was more deserving; people wanted it for him because he’s nicer, and they’ve known him longer; nobody can figure her out; if Grissom had given her the nod, well, everyone would have known why; that’s how she got this job, anyway; and, sure, she’s done all right; but she’s a little off, you know; she’s always been a little off.

Sara knew that she wasn’t winning popularity contests around the department, but she was fine not winning them because she was damn good at her work, and Grissom needed her, and that was all that mattered. Catherine thought she was a brat, Warrick sometimes looked at her like she was crazy, and Nick could be patronizing, but she belonged on the team as much as they did, and she could prove it with every hour she logged and case she solved. She could hold her own.

Now she doesn’t know if that’s true anymore.

Going to work every day, she feels like she’s causing more trouble for Grissom than she’s worth. He has to keep pulling strings for her. Maybe he is giving her special treatment.

For a long time, she remains motionless in bed. When she breathes, it hurts, a low ache residing under her ribs. She shifts where she lies, first onto her side, and then curled into a ball, but nothing makes her comfortable. Soon, she rises and showers under scalding water, scrubbing her skin until it ruddies and burns. How could she have been so stupid, drinking and driving? Sometimes she swears she’s out to sabotage herself. Maybe she wants to fail. Maybe failure is programmed into her.

Genetics.

“God,” she says, closing her eyes against the spray. “God. God. God.”

She dresses, calls a cab, and gathers her things, all on autopilot. Her kit is still in her car at PD, but she can grab it on her way in. She should eat something before she leaves her apartment, but her stomach roils, and she thinks she might be sick. She settles on black coffee, drinks two sips and almost vomits. By the time she meets the cab at the curb outside her building, she is practicing her resignation speech in her head.

_Grissom, I think we both know this isn’t working._

_Grissom, I need a change. I need—_

The cab driver glances at her in the rearview mirror and sees her hunched over with her head resting on her knees.

“Lady, you okay?”

“I’m fine.”

She arrives at work forty minutes before the start of shift, knowing that she and Grissom will be the only ones there so early. The cab driver drops her in the PD lot, and she goes to her car for her kit but stops before she unlocks the door, leaning there, taking deep breaths. It’s a cloudy night, and somewhere in the distance, towards the Strip, she hears cop sirens. Maybe she should just get in her car, drive away, and never come back. She hovers with the key unturned. The only thing that stops her from bolting is the fact that Grissom is waiting for her, and she knows that she owes him an explanation, everything considered.

When she was a kid, she hated getting in trouble, but she tended to find herself in trouble often, her life being what it was. With every visit to the principal’s office, emergency session with the guidance counselor, and stern talk with the social worker, she had to learn to steel herself, to pretend she wasn’t bothered.

Now she breathes through her teeth and goes directly from the PD lot to Grissom’s office, still wearing her jacket and carrying her kit. She lies to herself: She can handle his disappointment. She makes herself a promise she might not be able to keep: No matter what he says, she won’t cry.

She finds him at his desk, reading a book: _Hamlet_. An old, collegiate paperback copy. Well-worn.

For the split second before he realizes she’s there, she watches him and thinks about his kindness to her this morning, how he looked at her like she was made of glass, and he wanted more than anything to keep her from breaking.

She knows he can’t afford to be that kind to her now—not only because they’re at the lab, where he would never dare to hold or kiss her hand, given who might be watching, but because he needs to tell her how she’s failed, needs to chastise her. That’s his job. The administration will expect him to discipline her appropriately. She knows exactly the type of words he needs to say to her.

Trouble is, she can’t imagine him saying them.

People whisper about him, too, and sometimes they even say harsh things to his face: that he’s some kind of android, incapable of forming human connections, too much in his head to notice what’s going on around him. Even she has snarled such accusations at him occasionally in anger.

They’re wrong.

She was wrong.

For all his faults, he notices her.

Maybe that’s the problem.

“Sara. Come in. Uh, shut the door.”

She does as he directs, heart in her throat, taking a seat in the chair before his desk, setting her kit at her feet. She blinks too often, breathes too quickly. She should say something. Apologize. Quit.

Grissom closes his book and sets it aside. _“‘Words, words, words,’”_ he says, sighing.

“What?”

“Act 2, Scene II, Line 1296. Hamlet is reading.”

“Oh.”

He peers at her over the frames of his reading glasses, and she is still glass, and he is still being careful with her. “I think you should take some of your vacation days,” he says.

His voice is soft, but Sara is still wary. She knows that people can sometimes be soft when they’re telling you something that you don’t want to hear. They think it will make things easier, even though it never does.

“Am I being suspended?” she asks.

“No,” he says. “But you have ten weeks of paid vacation on the books, and I think that you should take them.”

Sara doesn’t want to get worked up—not when Grissom is being so placid—but she can’t help it. How is she supposed to handle ten weeks without working? What will she do with her time? God knows she doesn’t have family or friends to visit, and staying home alone in her apartment for that long would push her past her tipping point. She’s already barely holding onto her sanity as is.

“All at once? Grissom, that’s two months! Two months plus!”

Grissom remains placid. “Not all at once—not unless you want to. I was thinking, maybe, more a week or two here, a week or two there.”

“And do what? Sunbathe on the beach?”

Grissom shrugs. “Maybe. Or maybe you could attend some conferences. There’s a digital forensics seminar in Los Angeles next month. I had been planning to attend, but, uh, now that I think about it, it makes more sense for you to go. You’re better at computers.” So far, she’s been belligerent with him, but he smiles at her now like they’re sharing a joke.

Maybe they are.

Sara has no words, but Grissom doesn’t seem to notice. He continues, still placid.

“The officer who pulled you over had to log the stop. Nothing is going on your permanent record, but, um, per department policy, you’ll still have to complete some counseling. It will all stay confidential. As far as I’m concerned, you’re—” He trails off, perhaps waiting for her to speak now, but she still has nothing to say. She can’t even nod. After a second’s pause, he elaborates. “You can put in your vacation time whenever you like. Just try to be in town over the Fourth of July. Nick’s already asked for the weekend off.” He looks to her again.

Whatever fight had been in her loses its edge. Tears prick her eyes, but she doesn’t cry. She only stares at Grissom. She came to his office expecting—well, she doesn’t know what—to have to explain her actions, at least—to meet with some disapproval—not to have Grissom tell her she should go on paid field trips—not to have Grissom acting as if she hasn’t done anything wrong.

“Grissom,” she says. “I made a really dumb mistake.”

He nods. “You did.”

“I won’t ever do it again.”

“I know.”

They stare at each other, and Sara almost wants Grissom to get angry with her—to tell her how badly she fucked up, to warn her that she’s getting out of control—but he doesn’t. His look is soft and warm, curious even. She feels like he is seeing every part of her, like he’s learning her, just by looking.

She remembers: They were in Reno at a conference. It was before she moved to Vegas. She was telling him about some trouble she’d been having at work lately, complaining about being tied up in bureaucratic red tape on a case and some spat she’d had with a police officer at a recent scene.

They were outside, and it was cold, and she was smoking. At some point, she glanced over, and Grissom was giving her the same look that he’s giving her right now. The way he watched her was so careful that she couldn’t help but feel self-conscious. She blushed, warmed. Felt naked under his gaze, never mind her layers of clothing.

What, she asked him, snubbing out her cigarette.

Sounds like growing pains, he mused. She looked at him, confused, and he shrugged. Growing is never an easy process.

So what am I supposed to do? she asked.

He stared at her a moment longer. Give yourself room to grow, he said, as if it were simple.  

The next thing she knew, he was wrapping his arms around her, and then he stood there holding her for at least a full five minutes outside the conference center, their frozen breath blooming around them, crystallized, his arms tight over her shoulders. You could always come work with me, he said, and she thought he was joking. Then. You’ll be okay.

Eight months later, when he became shift supervisor, he offered her a job.

He makes no moves to touch her now, but he studies her in the same way, until she almost can’t stand it. She feels like she’s artwork in a museum, and he’s a patron who’s lingered in her gallery for hours, learning her every shadow and angle. There’s a word for what she sees in his eyes, but she’ll be damned before she gives it voice, even in her own thoughts.

Grissom breaks the moment. “You have a court date on the Andreas case coming up,” he says. “Stay here tonight for trial prep. I think the ADA is working late. He might want to hear from you.”

“Oh. Right,” Sara says. She still feels tied to how he was looking at her, caught up in her memories. She forces herself to collect her kit from the floor and rise.

Grissom is already shifting, too—reaching to place his book on the shelf behind him. He’s not looking at her anymore. She wants to say something to him, to tell him how much it means to her that he’s not giving up on her yet, to thank him for his discretion, to explain that she really is trying and that she’ll keep trying for as long as he allows her to.

“Grissom—,” she says, fully intending to tell him something revealing. But then he perks up and looks to her, his face open and eyes bright, the way they always were in San Francisco. Whatever words she was going to say die in her throat. She falters. “I’m—uh. I’ll call over there—to the DA’s office.”

“Okay,” he says.

Heat flares in her cheeks, and she exits his office.

Sometimes she is such an idiot.

He could burn her to the ground.


	3. Chapter 3

**III.**

Grissom took a gamble, telling Sara to spend her shift in the lab rather than in the field, and it pays off. There are only three callouts: one for Catherine and Nick, one for Warrick, and one for him, and his only requires that he process an arrestee at PD, an open-and-shut case in which the cops caught the guy in the act of robbing a house. After he takes the prints and photographs the superficial injuries, he’s back at the lab for the rest of the night, barring any other alerts, and it’s only one o’clock.  

He wants to find Sara, not because he thinks she requires his supervision but because he wants to see her. When she came to talk to him before shift, he couldn’t read her reactions to their conversation. He thinks his suggestion that she take some days off may have offended her, and, if she’s angry or indignant, he would like to know where she stands so he could do something to mollify the situation—to make her see he means no harm and that she’s not being punished. He would also, of course, just like to spend time in her company, to help her know she’s not alone.

He feels like lately he hasn’t seen her enough.

Passing through reception, Grissom asks if any more callouts came in while he was at PD, and the secretary tells him no, which means that Sara is probably still in the evidence locker, prepping for her case with the ADA, and Grissom could go to her, if he were brave. He tries to contrive some reason to seek her out, but nothing comes to him, or at least nothing practical. It’s too early in the shift to call for takeout, and there are no active cases on which he needs to consult her. Maybe he could make an excuse, but he also feels loath to impose. The truth is that for as much as he desires her company, he also fears that she doesn’t desire his. He can’t forget the fear in her eyes when they stood outside her door—the way she looked at him as if he posed a threat. The quick, bright concern in her eyes. He is, as always with her, a coward.

He ends up in his office with the door closed, typing a personal email.

_Mom,_

_Change of plans. I won’t be coming to town for that conference next month. Something came up at the lab. Sorry for the short notice. I’ll make it up to you._

_Gil_

At the end of shift, Sara doesn’t stop by Grissom’s office to tell him that she’s heading home, the way she normally does. Seven o’clock comes and goes, and it is quiet, and he is alone. Catherine appears at quarter after eight, late back to the lab after her callout with Nick. She pokes her head in Grissom’s office and greets him with a question.

“Did the referendum to cut our budget pass?”

Grissom arches an eyebrow. It’s a strange thing for Catherine to ask. Non sequitur. He shrugs. “Not that I’ve heard.”

Catherine frowns. “Then why so serious? You look like that paperwork is the worst thing you’ve seen all week, and I know for a fact that’s not true, not after—” She cuts herself off, unwilling to invoke Todd Coombs’s video-taped confession or mention the Parker case by name. She lingers in the doorway, scrutinizing him.

He isn’t at liberty to correct her assumption about the paperwork or the true source of his gravitas. He sighs. “There’s just a lot to do,” he says, ruffling the top folder on his stack for emphasis.  

Catherine offers him a sympathetic nod. She knows better than anyone how he struggles with a constant, mounting backlog of departmental forms and reports, so she accepts his explanation, however lame.

“Don’t stay here too late,” she warns, though she probably has an idea he won’t heed her.

Of course, it isn’t the paperwork that ends up keeping him late at the lab. Rather, it is his increasing sense of awareness that he is missing opportunities—that he’s losing something he won’t be able to live without. His thoughts are numerous and troubled, and, even if he were to go home, he wouldn’t be able to sleep with his mind so disquieted. He smooths a sheet of scratch paper down on the desktop and reaches for a fountain pen.

 _Sara,_ he writes but then stops.

He used to write her letters all the time, back when she lived in San Francisco. They were pen pals, and they corresponded with each other in longhand once or twice a month—nothing especially evocative, mostly journaling of the day-to-day happenings in their lives and all the minutiae they missed out on living far away from each other. Sometimes they wrote out thoughts on the books they were reading and world events, other times philosophical musings and notes from their more interesting cases.

In the months before she moved to Las Vegas, Sara had begun signing her letters with a heart beside her name.

Foolish to think about it now.

Grissom caps his pen and files the paper into one of his desk drawers, just the one word written on the page. By ten o’clock, he is home. He still has all of Sara’s old letters collected in a box in the hall closet, but he doesn’t dare reread them now. He hasn’t dared to for years, even though he also hasn’t been able to make himself throw any of them away.

In the coming days, he does eventually find reasons to check in on Sara at the lab—over the next several shifts, always when she is working alone somewhere. He finds her in the layout room, poring over crime scene photos, or in DNA preparing assays, and he talks to her about administrivia, like her trial prep with the ADA and whether or not she submitted her final report on the officer-involved shooting she investigated with Warrick last month.

Though he never manages to say exactly what he wants to her, he is able to get a better read on how she’s faring. She isn’t angry. More reticent. Unsure of how to make amends for what she has done wrong. Whenever he seeks her out, she smiles at him, but the smile falls far short of her eyes, and she never holds eye contact with him for long.

Three days pass before her request for vacation days turns up on his desk. She’s asked for a week off at the end of this month and for time for the Los Angeles seminar in June, plus scrawled a note at the bottom of the form: _More dates forthcoming._

Grissom hopes that she knows he isn’t sending her away—that this isn’t an exile.

When the new schedule comes out, Sara’s vacation becomes news around the lab. He overhears Catherine saying to Jacqui Franco that Sara must have something big planned because Sara _never_ takes vacations. Later, he walks in on Greg pestering Sara about where she’s going and what she intends to do while she’s gone, withholding DNA results until she reveals her travel itinerary to him.

“Don’t you have work to do?” Grissom says, snatching the printout and passing it over to Sara.

“I bet she’s going to visit her secret boyfriend,” Greg grouses.

Sara says nothing as she exits the lab, and Grissom watches her go.

The truth is that he doesn’t know whom, if anyone, she is going to visit.

Over the years, Grissom has observed Sara’s extreme devotion to the lab, and he has wondered if she comes by it because she lacks other outlets in her life. She’s more naturally social than he is, as most people are, and if she had another connection—particularly a local one—maybe she wouldn’t maintain such an exhausting work schedule.

He considers that when she was with her medic, she was less eager and available to respond to callouts, and she didn’t burn through her overtime so quickly every month. He supposes that being constantly on-call is a coping mechanism for her, something she does to fill her time in lieu of going out with friends or tending family obligations.

The question is whether or not Sara is as lonely everywhere else as she is in Vegas.

Vegas, Grissom can understand. Maybe because of its bustle, not in spite of it, Vegas can be a lonely place. It’s easy to get lost in a crowd here, especially when one leads a solitary existence. Grissom knew before he hired Sara that she had no ties in this city except for him—and he thought, at first, that he could be enough for her, that he could fill her time. He never meant to isolate her, but he honestly didn’t expect that she would come to him having no larger network elsewhere.

Nick is a transplant to Vegas, but he has family back in Texas he keeps in touch with on the regular, and he visits them as often as his schedule will allow. Grissom does the same with his mother in California. But Sara doesn’t seem to have anyone anywhere: no family, no friends, not even roommates like the one she had in San Francisco when Grissom first met her.

Sara has never talked much to Grissom about her childhood or her attachments. She once mentioned that she has a mother and brother, but Grissom gathers they don’t maintain much contact with one another. As far as he knows, she has never gone to see them and they have never come to see her for as long as she’s lived in Vegas. She works every holiday, never seems to be on the phone with anyone coming in to or leaving from work, and the only personal photographs she has taped up inside her locker are of animals and landscapes. Ever since her relationship with the medic ended, she hasn’t once arrived late to or left early from a shift.

Grissom has sometimes wondered if she isn’t completely alone, either by choice or fact of life. Some of the vacancies he sees in her existence seem so familiar to him—are lonelinesses he knows for himself—and thinking about them cuts another deep ache through his chest.

He needs to believe she has something, someone: a place to go and people to see.

Most people do, and she’s so easy to—

Scant as his knowledge is, Grissom does know that she’s from NorCal, a tourist town called Tomales Bay. She grew up around San Francisco, and that’s where he pictures her taking her vacation, probably because he has seen her there before and has made an association. He envisions her visiting if not her mother or brother then old SFPD coworkers, waking up to the salt air rolling in off the Bay, spending her days visiting bistros and bookstores. He sees her in his mind’s eye in some of the same places where he first came to know her, where he first fell—

The last shift before her vacation arrives, and he worries that he might not get the chance to speak with her at all before she leaves the lab. She’s working a gang hit with Nick and Catherine in the Alphabets, and he’s in Mesquite with Warrick processing what appears to be a B&E gone wrong.

He’s on his hands and knees on the tile floor in the kitchen, taking an adhesive lift of a shoe impression. He’s thinking that maybe he should call her to ask if she needs a ride to the airport or someone to collect her mail while she’s away, but then he’s also arguing with himself. He shouldn’t presume anything, and especially not that he would be her first choice for travel support. Or even a choice at all. If she did need someone to chauffeur her or housesit, he’s missed his chance to be that person in her life. She would probably sooner ask a stranger.

“Hey, Grissom, you okay down there?” Warrick asks, appearing behind him.

Grissom doesn’t know if he is okay—if he’s doing the right thing, sending Sara off by herself. As much as he wants to picture her visiting loved ones, he doesn’t know that she will. She may just be humoring him, taking a few days off here and there in the hopes that eventually he will forget her poor decision-making. She may well spend her time at home, waiting and listening to her police scanner.

Years ago, Grissom advised her to find some diversions outside criminalistics, but he doesn’t know if she ever has. She may view this absence from the lab less as a vacation and more as a sentence to be served. She may not have anywhere to go or anything to do without work.

He means to talk to her before she leaves, if he can.

Returning from his scene, he stops by Judy’s desk and asks her who’s in. She checks her log and tells him that Catherine’s team returned to the lab a few minutes before he and Warrick did and that Captain Brass is looking for him. He thanks her, and she starts to inform him that Captain Brass said to meet him at PD, but he’s already on his way to the locker room, drawn there as if by magnets.

Catherine passes him in the hall. “I’ve got five Swiss cheese bangers down with Doc Robbins right now,” she says, exasperated. “Get this: They had modified AKs, and—”

Grissom doesn’t listen to the end of her sentence. He blows by Nick coming out of the Print Lab and doesn’t say a word.

Sara is in the locker room, right where Grissom imagined her to be, exactly as he hoped to find her. She’s changing out her work jacket for her street jacket, and she’s silhouetted, half in light and half in the shadows. When she hears Grissom’s feet on the floor, she looks up at him, curious. He’s relieved to see that she isn’t afraid.

But he also realizes he has no idea what he means to say, now that they’re facing each other.

She waits a few seconds for him to speak. Then, when he doesn’t, she states the obvious: “I’m headed out. I’ll, uh—” She shrugs and loses her words.

If she were Catherine, Grissom would joke to her about sending a postcard. If she were Nick or Warrick, he would offer her some lighthearted goodbye—a quote, maxim, or warning to behave herself until she returned. But since she’s Sara, he can say nothing that doesn’t seem trite or somehow out of place.

Years ago, he would have had real words for her. An actual farewell. Now, he fidgets his hands and doesn’t look her in the eyes.

“See you next week.”

“Uh, yeah. See you then.”

She gathers her things and exits without donning her jacket. Her departure feels like a retreat.

Grissom remains where he stands until long after she’s gone. He misses her already.

The feeling only intensifies over the week that she’s on vacation.

Grissom had never considered it before, but the fact is that, ever since she moved to Vegas, Sara has become an integral part of his everyday life. Both of them work almost every shift and tend to max out their overtime, so only when one or the other of them attends a conference or they have back-to-back days off scheduled do they ever go more than forty-eight hours at a time without having direct contact, and, even then, there’s usually still some kind of ancillary communication between them: emails back and forth concerning cases, texts in and texts out, notes and memos left around the lab. An entire week with no interactions is something completely new and unwelcome.

He keeps wanting to run ideas past Sara and set her on specific assignments, only to remember her absence. He finds himself feeling the same way he does after rearranging furniture in his house—like everything is just a bit off, and he doesn’t know his way around anymore, despite the familiar landscape.

Though they haven’t worked as closely together in this last year as they had previously, he still relies on Sara in innumerable ways.

Usually, she’s the first to volunteer for tasks other criminalists might consider tedious, like detailing automobiles, creating facial reconstructions, or deciphering encoded documents. She also tends to get on his wavelength quicker than some of his other team members do, picking up on his more “out there” ideas and supporting him even if he butts heads with his department betters. She knows his preferred methods for evidence collection and can sometimes predict what he would like her to do before he even says the word.

But there are also other, less tangible things, like how she trades trivia with him at crime scenes; and how she makes a point to tell him goodbye at the end of every shift; and how, whenever she finds him alone in his office, reading in the dark, she turns on the lights to save his eyes—then smiles at him guiltily, like she’s embarrassed for caring too much.

There’s the way she reads his silences and how sometimes he’ll glance up from whatever task he’s doing to find her watching him, the look on her face brimming with something almost like awe or adoration.

Even when their situation is complicated, seeing her every day is a comfort. Just knowing that she’s present, working at a common cause with him, helps him to feel tethered to the earth, like he can be sure where the horizon is.

Otherwise, he’s out to sea.

In the last year, he has spent so much time trying to unfasten his life from hers, for both of their sakes, so that they could be free. But now he knows he’s still latched to her at a thousand points—that she occupies so many of his thoughts and so much of his time. Even at home, he’ll spend the minutes before he falls to sleep remembering their small interactions throughout the day. With her gone, he has nothing to think about except to wonder where she is, whom she is with, and whether or not she’s okay.

By the middle of the week, he’s contemplating calling her, making up some excuse, like that he can’t find a report she’s filed or that he needs her opinion on a case. She’s got to have her phone with her, wherever she is, and even if the conversation were a short one— _I don’t know, Grissom. I’m on vacation. Figure it out yourself_ —at least he’d be able to hear her voice and have some contact.

But no.

He isn’t entitled to having her in his life. She’s his coworker and his subordinate, and he has no right to her time or to her person when she’s not at work. He chose for things to be that way. She offered him more access, suggested they spend time together in places beyond the lab and during hours besides shift, but he declined. He broke her heart. It’s not fair of him to want her now, not when she might finally be moving on.

He finds an old message from her saved in his voicemail: _“Grissom, we finished processing the shed. We’ll meet you back at the lab.”_ Nothing personal about it. Nothing that doesn’t have to do with work.

He plays it for himself five times before he realizes what he’s doing and closes his phone.

It’s not fair.

The week moves so slowly, like the slog of midday traffic down the Strip. The team logs the same number of cases that they usually would, but somehow it seems either a hundred more or a hundred less, and Grissom isn’t sure which.

He knows he shouldn’t, but he counts down in first days, then hours, then minutes, until finally the shift when Sara is set to return comes around. He arrives to the lab two hours early, when swing is still on, and part of him hopes that Sara will be there already.

She isn’t, of course.

One by one, the other members of his team arrive, but not her, not yet. He remains camped out in his office, ostensibly doing paperwork but really keeping time on his internal clock: one-hundred and nineteen, one-hundred and eighteen, one-hundred and seventeen, and on.

Five minutes before eleven o’clock, he hears her voice in the hall.

“—you, too, David.” A pause. “In half? Wow. Can’t believe I missed it.”

She says something else that Grissom doesn’t catch, and he sits bolt upright. Her voice comes closer to his office, and then she appears in the doorframe.

“Catherine wants me to head out with her on the 419 in Summerlin. That okay?” she asks.

She looks no different than she did a week ago. There’s no visible sun on her skin or change in her demeanor. She is still dressed in black and seems just as cautious and reserved as she did before. That doesn’t necessarily mean she didn’t travel during her week away from the lab. Just that Grissom can’t gauge by looking whether or not she found her vacation agreeable.

Did she get the rest she needed? Does she feel refreshed? Is she angry with him for handling this situation the way he has?

He wants desperately to be able to read her.

But he can’t keep her from her work.

“It’s actually three 419s,” he says. “You’d, uh, better take Nicky along with you, too.”

“We were gonna take Greg, actually,” says Sara.

For a few seconds more, Sara lingers in the doorframe. To anyone else, such a small pause would mean nothing, but, to Grissom, it is significant. Between them, there is a context, a precedent. There have been a million instances since Sara moved to Vegas when they’ve had something to say to each other but haven’t said it, when he’s felt trapped, hedged in by invisible walls too high to climb and too thick to overcome, and when she hasn’t known how to address him because he hasn’t given her any latitude to say what she needs. In the next second, she’s leaving, and, before he thinks better of it, Grissom calls to her.

“Sara?”

She stops.

“Welcome back. It’s been quiet around here without you.”

She smirks at him. “Quiet? David Phillips told me you had a case where a construction worker got cut in half by a table saw.”

Grissom shrugs. “Mostly quiet, then.”

When Sara laughs at his joke, he feels at home again in a way he hasn’t felt in a week, as if he were the one who just returned after time spent away.

Once she finishes with the Summerlin triple, Grissom finds himself keeping Sara close to him, assigning her to his cases as often as he can find reason to do so. No one else seems to notice, but Sara gives him a look whenever he tells her that she’s with him, a hard stare, like she’s trying to make sense of an optical illusion. Maybe she thinks he’s babysitting her, after her close call, but that’s not what he’s doing, and he tries to make his intentions clear. He just wants her company, so he talks to her at their scenes—not about anything particular, just facts relevant to whatever they’re doing and solicitations of her opinion on this and that, calling her over when he finds something interesting.

One night, they’re in a residential neighborhood processing the latest in a string of auto thefts, holed up in a garage, printing and taking tread lifts. Coyotes warble out long howls in the desert lot dark beyond their scene’s penumbra. Otherwise, they’re alone, and all is quiet. They move like clockwork for hours, until Grissom happens upon an old box that appears to have been recently disturbed. When he rifles through its contents and sees what’s inside, he beckons her to him.

“Look. That’s a 1960 Willie Mays card, back when he played for San Francisco. His nickname was ‘The Say Hey Kid.’ He was one of my favorite players. I watched him hit a homerun at the Stick in ’68. I was twelve.”

Sara hovers over his shoulder. She looks at the card. “You and your baseball,” she says. Then, “I wasn’t born yet.” Her tone is melancholy. She smiles at him, though her expression comes across as sad. Something about her eyes. The look quickly fades, and suddenly she’s far away, even though they’re still standing in the same room. She parts from him, returning to her side of the garage. “I put in another vacation request,” she says, staring out the open garage door towards the dark street, to the quiet suburban houses, all lined up in long rows. “End of the month, just a few days. Is that—?”

“That’s good,” Grissom says, setting the Mays card back in the box with the rest of the collection.

He answers her maybe a bit too quickly. The pain is back in his chest, but he knows that it shouldn’t be there—knows that what he says is right and what he feels is wrong. It’s a good thing Sara’s asking for more time. That’s what he wanted her to do. He should be happy that she’s taking care of herself. He shouldn’t already be thinking about how much he’s going to miss her.

That’s selfish.

Sara stares at him like he’s a code she can’t decipher. “Are you sure?” she says. “Because I could always wait until later. I don’t have any—I mean, I just—”

“No, no, you should go. It’s a good time.”

“I’ll be here for the Fourth.”

“Yeah.”

Grissom nods, reassuring her that she’s made a good decision, one that he supports. But for the rest of the night as they remain in the garage, he can’t help but watch her more closely than he should—to try to memorize her every look and gesture, as if he could store the memories away and save them to sustain him in her absence.

They’ve brought in halide lamps to flood the garage, and behind her there’s a backdrop of darkness, so that she seems to be on a stage and he in the audience watching her enrapturing performance. She stoops to photograph an irregularity on the concrete floor, and he wants to applaud her. She brushes back a lock of her hair, and he wishes he had roses to toss adoringly at her feet.

If he could, he would keep her here with him, under the white lights, forever. He would marvel at her unendingly and cheer for infinite encores so that he could watch her actions, again and again and again.


	4. Chapter 4

**IV.**

She’s no good at taking vacations. The statement is true in two ways.

The first:

Her parents ran a bed and breakfast off a Tomales Bay estuary. Tourists came to visit the state park, eat Hog Island oysters by the pound, and observe, from June to November, as the beaches illumed with neon blue lights, small, teeming galaxies cycling through the surf, beating against the shore in waves—the bioluminescence of dinoflagellate plankton in bloom, of which Sara is still reminded, to this day, each time she uses Luminol to phosphoresce a scene.

While some B&Bs are historical, theirs wasn’t—just a cabin property converted to accommodate guests. There were two houses, one for the tourists and one for them. The houses had formerly been connected by a dogtrot, but the previous owners had knocked it out. With the connection gone, the houses stood twelve yards apart, which was distance enough to give both the owners and the guests their privacy but proximity enough to allow the owners to be on call for the guests at all hours.

For the tourists who came to stay, the B&B served as a tranquil retreat: a forested property that bordered both saltwater tidelands and a freshwater stream, safely removed from the traffic of San Francisco, fifty miles to the south, but not so rustic as to be uncomfortable or to require any sort of roughing. The price of their stay included a home cooked meal every morning, fresh linens daily and clothes laundered upon request, and personalized recommendations on how to best enjoy local activities, landmarks, and natural wonders. Most guests stayed only for a weekend, but some came for a week or more at a time, and many were repeat customers who made the B&B part of their holiday traditions. For them, the appeal of the place was that they could luxuriate and have their every need met.

But for Sara’s family, the B&B just meant work: Sara’s mother rising before dawn to prepare breakfast cooked to order, usually three hours or more in the making, depending on the size and specifications of the guest party; Sara’s father performing constant maintenance at the guest house—greasing the hinges on creaking doors, changing out rusted pipes and burnt lightbulbs, setting and replacing rat traps under the porch steps, making on-the-spot repairs whenever guests scorched the carpets as they sat on the floors smoking cigarettes or somehow jammed the sliding function on the shuttered windows, trying to allow in a breeze; both parents waking to phone calls in the middle of the night, rushing to unclog stuck toilets and tinker with the A/C units, which so often shorted out during hot weather; Sara being sent to collect baskets of dirty clothes and carry them to the main house to be laundered, acting as a gofer whenever guests needed aspirin or bandages or extra towels or blankets; everyone in the family talking up the Tomales Bay region and its attractions, giving directions to nearby towns and tips on local restaurants; always having to smile at the guest house, no matter what went on behind the walls of the family home.

It wasn’t all terrible—Sara did enjoy some of the guests, and particularly the adults who found her charming and articulate and liked to chat with her while her parents were checking them in or else closing out their bills—but it was grueling work, year-round, and it taught Sara from a very young age that no vacation is ever easy for everyone involved; that there are always people breaking their backs whenever you want to kick your feet up.

Even though she knows it’s their jobs and that some of them even like being in hospitality, she has difficulty relaxing whenever she vacations at a place where staff has to cater to her needs. She was twenty-two years old before she stopped folding her towels and making her bed at hotels, and even nowadays she feels a vague guilt visiting the big time chain resorts for conferences and conventions. She hasn’t been back to a B&B, not since—

So, the second way:

Sara has to work, just as a shark has to swim.

If she stops, she drowns.

She’s been working her whole life—her little chores at the B&B when she was small, and then either a part or full-time job every year since she was fourteen. She’s always had to work to support herself. But she’s also had to work for her own well-being.

Idleness doesn’t agree with her. Sitting for hours with no pressing tasks or structure to her day leaves her with too much time for thinking, and she hates being alone with her thoughts. Bad memories and self-doubts overrun her mind like ivy crushing the bricks of a moldering building, proliferating until they’re too copious and knotted for her to either hack through or beat back. The result is that she feels thick in the head, like she’s trapped two inches behind her eyes and can see everything but engage with nothing. The longer she thinks, the more she fixates on her own consummate brokenness, on her inability to relate to people, to open up, to just be calm and breathe. She gets jumpy. She gets angry. By the time she resumes her usual routine, she is worse off than she was before.

She requests the first week of vacation not because she wants to be away from the lab or hopes that doing so will help her but because she knows that it is what Grissom wants. They have their talk in his office, and he looks at her like she’s tragic. He implores her to take time—ten weeks throughout the summer, divided up how she likes—and then he waits to see her paperwork on his desk, holding his breath until he has it in hand.

He believes a vacation will fix her in the same way a small child believes that a Band-Aid will fix any hurt, even a broken limb.

But of course it doesn’t. She has no conferences to attend and doesn’t want to stay at a hotel, so she remains home for the duration of her time off. Somehow she convinces herself that she can do activities—clean out her bedroom closet the way she’s been meaning to, visit an art gallery she once drove by on the way to one of her scenes, work on trial prep for some of her cases with upcoming court dates—but she doesn’t, ultimately, end up doing any of them.

Mostly she spends too much time thinking. Then, when the thinking overcomes her, she has a beer or maybe two—waters down her thoughts, as if diluting brightly colored paints to pastels. She tries to sleep, but she never can. She has been a chronic insomniac ever since she was a child. Unable to do anything else, she stares at the white on her ceiling until she feels almost snow-blind. It’s nighttime, close to when she would normally be working. Her body and mind are completely awake, trained to a nocturnal schedule after so many years assigned to graveyard shift. Without work, she has nothing to do and no evidence to process. Just dead, dark hours in which to worry.

It’s all one prolonged panic attack for her, not in the loud, bright, kinetic way television shows portray them. She isn’t quaking or sweating. She doesn’t have the kind of nerves you can hear. Maybe that’s how it is for some people, but not for her, not usually. Her anxiety feels like motion sickness, a dull, milky nausea in the pit of her stomach. Like holding on for dear life during a long, dangerous car ride through a wending canyon with no cliff-side guardrails built up along the road. She brews tea and channel surfs, unable to focus on any show long enough to settle. Her mind is loud, like air raid sirens, but that’s all internal. On the outside, she’s still and small, curled up in afghan, sitting on the covers of her bed. She never turns down the comforter, and she only leaves her apartment once during the week, to go grocery shopping. She can’t count how many times she thinks, _God, I am an asshole._

On the last day of her week off, her phone rings, but she doesn’t pick up. The call goes to the machine, and she listens as an officer with a perky voice leaves a message from the department PEA program. Is there a time when she would be available to meet? Six sessions are mandatory, though additional sessions can be arranged.

She dreads making the appointment. Some people hate the idea of counseling because they’ve never gone, and they’re worried that if they do go, someone will confirm to them just how messed up they actually are. But that’s not her. She’s been in and out of counseling her whole life, and any counselor worth his license can diagnose exactly what her issues are twenty minutes into a session. She’s well aware of her neuroses, so her problem is not in learning what’s wrong. It’s in knowing that there’s nothing she can do to fix it.

They all have methods they suggest, strategies she can use to work through her anger, anxiety, and depressive episodes, and she tries those methods, puts them into practice, becomes more functional—a model citizen. But she still feels visceral dissonance, like her wellness is a radio frequency picking up persistent static.

Sure, she doesn’t have outbursts anymore, not the way she did when she was a child: no more cussing out the teacher who tried too hard to mother her or decking the kid at the back of the bus for making a morbid play on her name. No more adolescent recklessness, either. You won’t catch her taking fifty mile motorcycle rides down the coast with boys she doesn’t really know or chain-smoking Pall Malls in alleyways until her throat aches and her fingertips yellow. She’s punctual, well-spoken, mindful of her responsibility for her own feelings, even empathetic, at times.

But though she has become less of a problem for other people, she has remained a problem for herself. Her functionality is almost a hindrance to her, at this point. She performs so well at her job and is so adept at keeping her symptoms either hidden or camouflaged that most people don’t have any idea how difficult it is for her just to make it through a day. They would never suspect that she is finally on the verge of what promises to be a real and lasting breakdown.

Her teammates know she is an insomniac and that she has control issues, but they know these things about her in the same way that they know Grissom needs reading glasses and that Hodges is anal retentive. In some ways, they view these traits as her superpowers. She’s the criminalist who can work a triple without slowing down or stopping and whose obsessive attention to detail makes her particularly well-suited for her field. They don’t realize how hard she crashes when she goes home every morning. They’re not seeing her where she is right now: holed up in her apartment, furious at herself for not having a better game plan in place for this vacation. What she wants to tell them is that sometimes she feels like a key that’s been so chipped or bent out of shape that it will never fit its rightful lock. What she actually tells them is nothing.

Grissom is the only one who has any idea, and even he doesn’t know the half of it.

Working the job that she does, Sara has seen people whose parents supremely messed them up, to the point where there is no hope that they’ll ever be able to cope or carry on. She’s one of those people, though she tries to pretend that she isn’t. No matter how many knots she unravels in herself, there’s always something else tied up so tight at her core. Eventually, even the counselors look at the snarl and say fuck it—or in their words, “You’re not progressing. I’m questioning your commitment to treatment.”

It’s not like she doesn’t want to get better.

She does, desperately.

But when it comes down to it, no counselor has ever been able to tell her how to cope with that thick hedge of thoughts and feelings inside. No one can give back was taken from her—or, really, what she never even had to begin with. She lacks some fundamental component, some vital element that she should have gotten as a child but didn’t get, that her parents didn’t give to her at the critical moment, and now she can never compensate for what she’s missing.

The first time she worked a case where she saw a victim shot through with a close-range shotgun blast, she looked at the body and thought, _That’s it. That’s me. That gaping wound in the side._ She walks around with it, carries it with her.

It’s not just that one event, not just that one night. It’s all her most important years, the fact that her parents taught her that the world worked in the most convoluted way possible, and she was too young to see how they were twisting things. She knows her worldview is flawed, but she can’t see in any other way, can’t stop jumping at loud noises. She wants to, but there’s no retraining for how she was raised and nothing that can snap her out of it. The counselors can treat symptoms all they want, but they can never rid her of the underlying condition, and she hates having person after person confirm to her what she’s always already known and feared: that she is irreparably broken, and she’s never going to be truly happy.

After everything that’s happened, she is incapable of it.

That’s what she wants to tell Grissom, but she can’t, not when she’s sure that he would never be able to look at her the same way again, once he knew the truth. At best, he would pity her. At worst, he would be horrified. Either way, she couldn’t stand the change.

She knows she shouldn’t, but she needs him to keep believing in her, even if she can’t believe in herself. The way he looks at her sometimes: all blue eyes and endless light. It’s like he thinks she’s perfect, not in the impossible, romantic way she prayed someone would think she was perfect when she was a teenager, but in the way that, even with her flaws, he doesn’t find her lacking. He believes she isn’t in any way less. He knows she makes mistakes, but he always seems to think she has reason to persevere. And he’s probably that way with everyone he knows, but he’s the only person who’s that way with _her_ , who believes that she’s worth a damn, that she has anything going for her, so how can she help but be attached?

If the light in his eyes when he looks at her were ever to disappear, she couldn’t stand it.

She shouldn’t, but she wants for that light while she’s away. She only finds it when she returns to the lab after her week is up, and Grissom is there waiting for her. He doesn’t ask her how she spent her vacation or if she went anywhere. He just seems relieved to see her, like one of his last ditch experiments unexpectedly came through.

She doesn’t delude herself into thinking that he missed her. He just worried about her, is all. She’s given him cause to worry.

Each of her teammates except for Grissom wants to know where she went and if she had a good time while she was away. She offers them vague answers— _Can’t believe I waited four years, huh?_ —and avoids saying anything about how she stayed at home and languished. Diverting the conversation onto other subjects is easy enough. She asks her coworkers what she missed and starts everyone talking about their cases.

Greg is the only one who isn’t deterred. He has already asked her three times to give him a play-by-play of her week off when he sits down across from her in the break room during their shared lunchtime. “How was your super-secret vacation?” he asks. “Class reunion? Acapulco?” He grins at her and snatches a potato chip off her plate.

“It was great,” she lies, eyeing him as he begins to eat her meal.

“I’m sure it was,” Greg says. He winks at her like they’re in cahoots about something. She has no idea what he’s implying. He makes a show of checking that they’re alone and then leans in. “You don’t have to lie to me: I know you’re job-hunting.” He says the last part in a stage whisper.

Sara quirks an eyebrow. “And where did you get that idea?”

Greg shrugs and snags another chip from her. “I just know things,” he says. “You’ve been having secret meetings with Grissom, taking off when you never have before. I always knew you were too much of a rock star to stay at this place forever. Just promise you won’t forget us little people when you’re running Quantico—”

Sara scoffs. “Greg, I’m not going to work for the FBI.”

“But you’ve gotta be interviewing somewhere,” Greg says. “I mean, you never take time off. Now you’re taking two vacations in three weeks?”

Sara rolls her eyes. “Well, I hate to break it to you, Mr. Conspiracy Theories, but I’m not taking next week off to go on vacation. There’s a digital forensics seminar that Grissom asked me to attend. You know how Assistant Director Cavallo is retiring? Well, he’s feeling extra generous—”

“Budget’s not his problem, as of next quarter.”

“Right. So he’s thinking about updating our whole software system at the lab. Wants to see if there’s anything top-of-the-line coming out.”

Sara is more or less telling the truth. Or at least the truth as she's extrapolated it, contemplating why Grissom would have signed up to attend this particular seminar in the first place.

Still, Greg doesn’t back down. “So why send you?”

Sara shrugs. “Why not send me?”

But Greg’s doubt about the seminar isn’t entirely unwarranted. Sara never would have chosen to attend this particular event had Grissom not foisted it on her. She has some tech background, as all criminalists in her generation do, but digital forensics certainly isn’t her specialty—more Warrick’s or Nick’s. They’re the ones who usually scope out new toys for the lab, and they’re much more willing than she is to spend time away from work. Long seminars like this one aren’t her speed. She typically holds out for short conferences with a wider offering of course topics, like AAFS or its regional counterparts.

Grissom is pleased that Sara is going to LA—she can tell by how warm he is with her in the week leading up to her departure. He still believes that what she needs is time, that if she goes away from the lab for a while, she’ll come back better off. Rested. Rejuvenated. Whole.

Though she doesn’t share his belief, she does feel strangely protective of it. Someday, the inevitable will happen, and he’ll see that she is a lost cause. But she doesn’t want that day to be today or tomorrow or this month or this year. Not so soon after he’s seen her at a low point. Not when he’s trying so hard to rescue her.

She wants him to feel like he’s doing right and like he’s done everything he can to help her, so that when she finally crashes and burns, he won’t have any misplaced sense of guilt or remissness. Part of her knows that he’ll blame himself when she breaks down, regardless of the timeline. But she wants to give him conciliating evidence to look back on: history that proves he isn’t culpable, that he was compassionate, that her failure doesn’t reflect on him at all—that if his management could have helped her, it would have.

That’s why she asks for an additional four days off at the end of June, a third vacation: to show him that she’s really trying and that he’s good for encouraging her to try.

God knows he blames himself for enough things that aren’t his fault.

She attends the LA seminar and makes the best of the experience. The classes aren’t half-bad, and having a set schedule, with workshops to attend in the mornings and afternoons and readings to complete in the evenings, is an arrangement she can live with. Despite her lack of expertise, she does see some interesting presentations and makes good contacts for the lab. If outgoing AD Cavallo were to want suggestions, she would have them for him. Maybe she could even file a report.

When she has downtime, during the lunch hour or after the seminar has disbanded for the day, she walks the city around the convention center, exploring side streets and nearby parks. The air smells like jasmine, suntan oil, and saline low tide, and the people stand under palm shadows, avoiding the late afternoon heat and smoking cigarettes.

She thinks, in spite of herself, about how Grissom grew up twenty miles to the south of here, in Marina del Rey, near Santa Monica, and realizes that he probably signed up for the seminar specifically so that he could go back—go _home_ —to visit, but he gave up his trip for her. She wonders about his motivations and then wonders what it would be like, having someplace to go home to. She thinks, in spite of herself, about him.

When she returns to Vegas, he seems to have been waiting for her.

Everyone else wants to know about the seminar and its perks—what the latest software capabilities are, if there is any new tech the lab should budget for, if she picked up samples or goody bags, if she spent time on the beach—but Grissom holds off on his inquiries until her second night back on shift, when they’re driving to a body dump, alone together in their truck.

She has the wheel, and he sits in the passenger seat. He has been watching her ever since they pulled out of the parking lot at the lab, and she has been trying not to notice. It’s a hot night in Sin City, and his attention feels like added heat on her face.

They’re turning onto Boulder Highway when, out of nowhere, he says, “It always feels strange to me, going back to California. I grew up there, went to school there, worked in LA for a while. But, uh, going back, it’s always kind of—what’s that word Freud uses?— _unheimlich_.”

She supplies the translation on impulse: “Unhomelike.”

He smirks. “You took German?”

“No,” she says. “French in high school. Latin in college. But I also took Gothic literature. The English Department still likes Freud—or they did back then.”

Grissom nods. “I took German.” Then. “Do you like it?”

“What? German?”

“Going back to California.”

She considers for a moment and shrugs. “I’m not attached to where I grew up, if that’s what you’re asking. California’s just another place. And, anyway, NorCal and SoCal are so different. LA is like a different country, compared to what I was used to.” She intends for the statement to stand by itself, but then she speaks again, on impulse, saying too much in the way she so often does around Grissom. “I mean, sometimes it’s hard to believe it’s been almost four years since—”

“—since you moved here?” he supplies.  

Immediately, she glances at him, worried that she’s broken their unspoken rule—that they never refer to anything that happened between them before she started in Las Vegas, including the fact that she wouldn’t have left San Francisco had he not asked her to work for him. She sees herself in the rearview, the streetlights reflecting fear in her eyes.

But he’s not looking at her anymore. He bites his lip, chewing over a thought. “Yeah, hard to believe sometimes,” he says, sounding distant. Then. He glimpses the mirror again, checking her expression. “You got some sun in LA.” A smile. Fondness. “It brings out your freckles.”

And just like that, they could be in California—not in LA but on Marshall Beach, near the Bridge. It could be five years ago. He could be holding her hand. They could be leaning in close to each other, watching the whitecaps curl over beneath the risen moon, the tide more insistent than it had been before sundown. They could be drunk on kisses. Kissing more. His artless adoration could be just one more idyll during another of their long and perfect days.

The moment tugs at her like an undertow, moving her despite her intentions to remain firmly grounded inside herself. She knows, logically, what she shouldn’t think, shouldn’t want, and shouldn’t feel. But more heat burns over her cheeks, and she smiles at Grissom, charmed but also shy.

Maybe she should stop the conversation there, master herself and remember that things aren’t the same as they were in San Francisco. But she allows for a beat of silence and then draws a breath.

“Why German?”

The question isn’t inherently intimate—but between them it is. She doesn’t usually allow herself to ask him about anything outside the purview of their work, certainly not about his childhood and adolescence or why he’s made particular choices in his life. But he started the game tonight, and she’s going to play until he shuts her down.

Now it’s Grissom’s turn to be shy. He smiles again and shrugs. “I was in a Wagner phase,” he admits.

Sara laughs, picturing him as a teenager listening to German opera when the other kids his age were into Paul McCartney and Chicago. Funny to imagine him in the context of the 70s, the shaggy hair, burnt earth tones, and broad clothing cuts. “In high school?”

He nods, still seeming embarrassed of himself. “When I turned up the volume on the record player, _Der Ring des Nibelungen_ would shake the whole house.”

Now he’s being precious. She rolls her eyes. “Your mother must’ve loved that.”

He shrugs. “My mother’s deaf, so she couldn’t hear the music—but when the floorboards started to rattle, she felt it. I got my record player privileges taken away for week. She worried that the neighbors would hate us.”

Grissom relates this anecdote straightforwardly, as if it were as pedestrian as old case details or a comment on the weather. But it doesn’t feel pedestrian to Sara, not when it’s the most he’s told her about himself since she moved to Vegas, not when it’s something about him she had never known before.

In some ways, she feels she knows Grissom too well, and that’s the problem. He’s told her about how his father died when he was nine, about how he struggled with leaving the Church as a teenager, about how science became his new religion—things she doubts he’s told anyone else on the team, except for maybe Catherine; things he disclosed to her in San Francisco, when their relationship, whatever it was, existed in more intimate microcosm.

There are also things she knows about him not because he’s told them to her but because she’s taken care to observe: that he tends to blame himself for bad outcomes, even and especially when they’re not his fault; that he sometimes purposefully baffles people with his quirks to keep them at a safe social distance; that when he first kissed her, he did so with boyish uncertainty, self-conscious of where he put his hands and how he moved his lips and if he were allowed to want to taste her as much as clearly he did.

She knows parts of him that are ineffable, softnesses and shadows, hints of his true mettle, what is vulnerable inside him, what is hopeful, what is secret—and, maybe, possibly, what he looks like when he’s in—

She won’t ever say.

In some ways, she is more familiar with him than she has ever been with anyone, even the coworkers and roommates she had the longest and the old boyfriends she was most serious with. The intimacy is almost intolerable. It’s one of the things she thinks about when she’s stuck in her own head: how two people can be so impossibly intimate in some respects though virtually strangers in others.

Sometimes she feels like she and Grissom are right on top of each other, and, other times, that they are miles apart. Ignorance is distance.

The story he just told her proves just how many facets of his life remain a mystery to her. She had never known that his mother was deaf, and if she had never known such an important biographical detail about him as that one, what else might she not know?

Normally, she would find this kind of revelation daunting: a warning to her that you can learn so much about a person without ever really learning anything about them at all; that there exists such great potential for omission in any human relationship. She would question if there is ever really a way for two people to know each other, to overcome the chasm that exists between one individual mind and another.

But tonight her reaction isn’t intellectual or self-concerned: Her only feeling is that she doesn’t want Grissom to be lonely.

Even with all she doesn’t know about him, she is the person at the lab who knows him best—even more so than Catherine or Brass, though they’ve worked with him longer. She is sure she is because she sees how often others misunderstand him and hears people ask questions about him she knows the answers to. She is almost certain she has heard more of his stories than anyone else has, and she is certain that she is the only one who has personal experience with his skin and his heartbeat and the press of his lips. God knows being physical with someone doesn’t always make you an expert in them. But with Grissom, it does count for something. She has experienced him when he is vulnerable, and she has witnessed his wanting in a way that to their wider world remains hidden. For as much as he has withheld from her, he has also confided in her more than he has anyone else.

So if she is the person he has confided in the most, but she still knows so little about his life, how isolated must he be? How much must he keep to himself?

She knows from experience what that’s like—to be alone with your secrets, even among those who know you best. In her case, it’s inevitable. But Grissom shouldn’t have to be alone. He should know that even if things are strained and complicated between them, she’ll still listen to his stories. He can tell her anything, and it would never change how she—

She wants to keep the conversation going and Grissom talking. She remembers a case from her first year in Vegas. “Is that how you know sign language?” she asks. “Did your mother teach you?”

He nods.

“Does she still live in California?”

Another nod. “Same house I grew up in.”

Sara smirks. “So going back to see her must be a little _heimlich_ ,” she teases.

They’ve gotten dangerously close to stepping over their line now—to talking about personal things in the way they used to in San Francisco.

Grissom smirks. “In a way. I suppose. But it’s never the same going home to Mom after you leave for college that first time.” When he stares at her in the rearview mirror, the heat on her skin intensifies. He watches her so intently, like he has started to figure out something important about her. She had thought, for a moment, that she was captaining this moment—that her self-assurance was discomfiting him. But now the way he looks at her has her flustered. She swears to god: If he said the right word, he could burn her to the ground. He shrugs. “Vegas is home for me nowadays.”

He tries to sound nonchalant, but the insinuation is clear.

They’re pulling into the dumpsite now, and Sara feels a flicker beneath her breastbone, as if it were the lick of a flame. He stepped over the line—and she couldn’t prove it using only his words, written out in transcript, but she feels the progress like an ignition, all the way through her tinder bones.

For the few more seconds that the truck remains in motion, he holds his gaze on her and doesn’t seem at all regretful to have implied what he has. But the instant the vehicle slows to a stop, and she kills the motor, a curtain seems to drop, and suddenly their strange comedy of revelations has ended. They’re done talking about the past, breaking their own rules, having intimate conversations.

“David is on a callout in Pahrump, so we’re waiting on Doc Robbins,” Grissom says, unbuckling his seatbelt to exit the truck.

They spend the rest of their night in a dry drainage ditch, sorting through empty bottles, used condoms, and other detritus. Grissom isn’t cold to Sara, but he doesn’t dare to meet her eyes under the blinding brightness of the floods. He shows her his findings, but their conversations are monovalent. Safe. They’re standing right beside each other, but there could be a hundred empty rooms between them.

He seems now to want to forget his admission—and he apparently does forget as the week goes on and the departure date for her third vacation draws ever nearer. He had been taking her along with him on almost all his cases, ever since she got pulled over. But now he sends her off with Catherine or even solo whenever he can. He doesn’t entirely stop talking to her, but he does limit their interactions, sticking to short orders and case details. The same door that slammed shut between them when he learned that she was dating Hank has suddenly closed again, after only a brief period of opening.

Sara thinks she understands.

Grissom only wanted to be her friend, and she misconstrued his intentions, mostly because they have never tried this before—friendship in the strictest sense, with no additional expectations.

They’ve always been friends, really, he perhaps her best: the person she is closest to and the one she feels the most for. But they’re also not exactly friends, not in the simple way. Grissom dropped everything to drive her home after the officer brought her in to PD. He did so without thinking twice and was so sweet about everything, gentler than she deserved. But then, before that, he also refused to talk to her for the better part of a year. He wouldn’t look at her straight on. And she—well, she always would do anything for him, but most of the time, she can do nothing. She craves his company, but she can’t tell him her secrets, not the biggest thing there is to know about her. She feels like a downed powerline in his presence, conductive and frantic. They’re always looking for something from each other, not necessarily better but certainly different. Friendship is comfortable with itself. But whatever their relationship is, it has never been completely comfortable, at least not in Las Vegas. It has always wanted for evolution and connection. For some kind of electric shock.  

Before, in San Francisco, they had been a supernova. Their first meeting was intense, a Big Bang, and everything they did together during those first two years carried so much meaning, such ferocious wanting, such cosmic implication. They were forming a universe. Just being around him had spun her off her axis, made her feel like she was breathless and caught up in some grand genesis. But once she moved to Vegas, after that first year especially, they experienced strain almost to breaking. Then silence. Stillness. The universe between them suspended, on pause, all the matter conserved and waiting.

Or at least she thought the story went that way. That’s what she has told herself, to this point.

In retrospect, she considers: They met. They connected in the way that people do at conferences. Fumblingly, recklessly, like teenagers at summer camp. Caught up in a fantasy of escapism—of being away from their usual people, places, and responsibilities. Wanting to have some fun. They made out a few times. She was overeager, as she has always been, but also young and hoping for a miracle. She thought they were serious. But to him, it was a fling, or maybe more a bad decision. He was behaving badly, coming on to a girl fifteen years younger than he was, a CSI Level II with stars in her eyes because he was a forensic science celebrity. She was being naïve, proving her immaturity. Even now, she doesn’t believe he ever meant to lead her on. His mistake was to assume that she understood that their relationship was finite. Then when she clearly expected more than there was for him to give, long after the tryst had run its natural course, he didn’t know what to do or how to let her down. They kept on going. He got her off at a conference, and then things got awkward later on when he became her boss. Ever since then, they’ve constantly misunderstood each other. When she thinks about how she has behaved, shame sweats off her in waves.

Part of her tries to argue that that’s not what happened, that her first version of events holds true. She likes that story better, though everything ends just the same. Somehow it hurts less, thinking about stasis rather than mistakes.

Isn’t there what Grissom said in Reno about them having room, being able to grow? What he said during the Marlin case? Didn’t _care about_ mean something else from him, something both of them have felt but neither one will dare say? Haven’t there been so many small touches and looks over the years, little charged moments like lightning strikes in the desert? The bed sheets and the blood and the drying wax? Doesn’t he buy her gifts, walk with her arm-in-arm, sometimes call her _honey_ —a name he’ll give to no one else? Didn’t he kiss her hand?

If it were just about some groping at a conference, they both would have moved on by now. They wouldn’t be so awkward around each other. She could have let it go.

But she knows she has to stop thinking that way. She knows she has to convince herself that whatever they were to start out with, they’re not anymore.

That’s the exact problem: They’ve always been either the nebulous, frenetic dyad they were in San Francisco or else the strange, uncomfortable binary stars they’ve become in Las Vegas, affecting each other’s gravity but never conjoining their two orbits. Even after so many years, they’ve failed to find a stable in-between. An equilibrium. They’ve always been something other than simply friends.

So his resumption of old habits. So him inadvertently expressing too much, causing her to think that maybe they were going back to where they started. The cues were all familiar, but the meaning behind them changed. She read too much into the conversation—of course she did; she always does—and he realized what was happening—that they were on a collision course, and he had to move them off somehow. So suddenly silence again.

He isn’t trying to be cruel to her, just kind, and somehow that makes it all worse: that she is so damaged that she mistook basic human kindness for romantic affection; that she ruined the gift he was trying to give her by taking it the wrong way.

She knows what she must look like to him: this flailing adolescent who can’t tell the difference between a crush and the other thing. She must exasperate him, with her clinginess. _Clingy_. It’s the word a college boyfriend once threw in her face during a breakup, and ever since, she’s feared that he was right: that she does dig in too soon and too deep, that she is too needy. She hates the idea that she has been that way with Grissom, that maybe she has asked more from him than what he is willing to freely give.

The last shift arrives before her third vacation, and she has no idea what she’s doing—only that she asked for four days off, and Grissom granted them to her, and now she feels like her head will explode if she thinks another thought about either him or anything.

He doesn’t seek her out to say goodbye before the end of shift. There are no awkward farewells in the locker room this time. Just her in the hall and him in his office. Just her feeling like she is spun on her axis. She’s always wanted everything too much, and especially what she can’t have. She has to come to terms with that.

She finally understands.


	5. Chapter 5

**V.**

On the third night after Sara leaves for Los Angeles, Grissom and Catherine respond to a callout for a body washed up along the shore of Echo Bay.

Even hours after sundown, the night is hot, like the inside of a kiln. Because the A/C in this particular truck is weak, they drive with the windows rolled down. Inside the city boundaries, they talk their usual shop—how they’re going to process the beachfront, to what extent they will have to involve the NPS Rangers in their initial sweep—their conversation scored by the Doppler whir of freeway traffic and preternatural blare of Apache cicadas in the desert.

But then they hit the freeway, and Catherine casts a furtive glance at Grissom in the rearview before putting her eyes back on the road. She seems to steel herself for something, drawing a breath as if she were about to dive underwater.

“Gil,” she says carefully, “we’ve worked together a long time.”

“We have,” Grissom acknowledges.

Catherine is building up to something, and they’re such old friends that he can tell right away it is some sort of criticism, based on her caution. He isn’t concerned. Her criticisms are typically well-thought out and always well-meant, even when they’re frank. He nods, an invitation: _Speak your mind_.

“Right,” she says. “Well, over the years, we’ve gotten to know each other’s management styles, so I know that, when it comes to personnel, you like to play things close to the chest. You’re, uh, very discrete—and that’s one of the things I admire about you.”

“Thank you,” Grissom says.

Catherine draws a sharp breath, bracing. “I don’t need details, but I just want to ask you: Is everything okay with Sara?”

“Sara?”

Catherine checks him again in the rearview. “It’s just—she’s, uh—missed a lot of work lately.” Then, immediately. “I mean, not a lot, a lot! But a lot for her. She usually maxes out every month, and she’s already taken off some days last month, this month, and I see on the schedule she’s got another vacation coming in a couple weeks.”

Per usual, Catherine’s observations are correct. Sara doesn’t typically take vacations or even sick days, and her multiple absences over the last few weeks are unlike her—something she has never done before. But Catherine’s intent isn’t just to note a peculiarity. She has some point she wants to make. She still hasn’t leveled the criticism that Grissom knows is coming.

He shrugs and downplays, determined to protect Sara’s privacy. “She had a lot of vacation days saved up, and she’s using them.”

Catherine scoffs. “There are vacations, and then there are ‘vacations.’ Listen, Grissom, we’re trained observers. We get paid to notice things. There’s something going on. I don’t know what it is—I don’t want to know!—but I do want to make sure you’re being smart about it.”

She’s talking now the same way Grissom’s mother did when she gave him the safe sex lecture during his teenage years.

“Pardon?”

Catherine sighs. “It’s just that you tend to handle almost everything under the table—and, like I said, that’s admirable!—you’ve got our backs!—but sometimes you need to leave a paper trail to keep things from coming back and biting you in the ass. There are protocols in place for a reason and infrastructure, and you can’t fix every problem yourself.”

Someone who didn’t know Catherine well would think she had already arrived at her criticism, but Grissom understands that she is circling around what she really wants to tell him. The bullseye is still to come.

“I know,” he says, waiting for it.

She nods. “I know you know. I just—well, sometimes, when it comes to Sara—”

“What?”

“Sometimes, when it comes to Sara,” Catherine says, careful again, “you take things kind of personally.”

There it is.

Grissom doesn’t answer her critique right away. He couldn’t, even if he wanted to. To him, words are quantifiable units with normalized values, but Sara is something incalculable and dynamic. Try as he may, he can seldom articulate what he’s thinking about her. He has worked to do right by her these last few weeks, but he can hardly explain to himself why he believes the actions he’s taking are the right ones, let alone explain his reasoning to someone else.

Even to Catherine.

Catherine figured out years ago that Sara wasn’t just Grissom’s field contact from San Francisco, and she has even discussed his relationship with Sara with him before, but he still doesn’t know what to say to her now. The situation is too difficult to parse and too private.

She shows pity. “Look,” she says, her tone kind, “we all have someone who makes us want to be a little bit reckless. They need help, and you wanna help them, never mind the rules. I’m just saying that you have resources. You might think you’re helping her by handling whatever this is internally, but, sometimes, when you’re too close to a situation you can’t—”

“It’s been dealt with,” Grissom says, more brusquely than he means to.

Catherine takes another look at him in the mirror, and, in the same way he knew she would criticize him, she knows that he is lying. Their nearly twenty years of friendship hang between them in the heat of the desert night, the reason why she won’t press him to be honest, no matter how curious or concerned she might be; the reason why he can’t hold her gaze in the rearview, knowing that she might be right.

A different tack, then. “Sara’s tough,” Catherine says, conciliatory.

Grissom nods. “She is.”

“It’s just that you’re usually Mr. Detachment.”

He sighs. “Yeah.”

Catherine knows him too well to expect that he’ll spill his guts, but she probably can’t help but want him to respond with something more than a monosyllable. She waits for him to elaborate, but of course he doesn’t. She’s hit on the exact problem, and there’s nothing more to say: When it comes to Sara, he can’t detach.

They lapse into silence, the cicadas blaring in the distance, the freeway ahead of them long and dark. They don’t speak again until they reach the bay, and then it’s on to work and the task at hand. Sara is in Los Angeles, and Catherine will never know how conflicted Grissom feels, trying to be Sara’s supervisor and her friend—whatever that means, whatever it should mean.

Grissom’s mind is generally well-partitioned, parceled off according to hard categories: work, home, recreation, education, acquaintances, friends, family members, past, present, future, and so on. But Sara defies classification. If his thoughts were a library, he wouldn’t know where on the stacks to shelve her book and would probably end up keeping it with him indefinitely at the circulation desk. Whereas he can typically examine any subject objectively, even those which are most personal to him, with her, there is always some element of emotion. Paradoxically, the more he tries to tell himself he is just doing what is logical in regards to her, the more he proves to himself that he is not.

It is as if two parallel roads run through his mind, and a car drives down each one: the first road is his cases, his work, his daily responsibilities; the second, Sara and the nagging feeling that, despite his best efforts, he is doing wrong by her again, and he’ll come to regret it. But his brain’s attempt to compartmentalize is failing. The car on the Sara road drives faster and farther than the other one, and sometimes he ends up watching it more closely than he does the car on the work road. He has never been less able to focus.

Of course, it’s all Dostoevsky, isn’t it? Polar bears upon polar bears, despite his best intentions.

The Echo Bay case requires him to pull a double, but, eventually, he and Catherine get the thing solved. He’s just gotten word from Vartann that they have their suspect in custody when Judy stops him the hall to tell him that AD Cavallo would like to see him before he heads home for the day. Having spent all night on Lake Mead and all morning and afternoon processing the suspect’s storage unit, he is thoroughly exhausted. His face feels tight, his thoughts loose. His shoes are still slightly damp with lake water. Still, he dutifully reports to Cavallo’s office.

“You wanted to see me, Robert?”

“Gil. Come in. Close the door.”

Generally, Grissom would not consider himself antiestablishment, but he will admit he feels an aversion to administrators. While Las Vegas has had a few good sheriffs and lab directors during the two decades that he has worked at the crime lab, the city has more often had bad brass.

In addition to intermittent problems with corruption, there have been waves of poor policy, budget mismanagement, and a special brand of bureaucratic slipperiness that involves taking credit that hasn’t been earned and passing the buck when blame gets placed.

Over the years, Grissom has come to believe that law enforcement administrators are typically persons so far removed from the work they’re supposed to oversee that they end up impeding the justice process rather than helping it along—which is in part why he has never aspired to a higher position than the one he currently holds.

Good leaders need to be in the field with the people they’re leading, not behind desks rubberstamping reports. If they must remain behind desks rubberstamping, then they need to understand how largely insignificant their views on what happens in the field are and act accordingly. The administrators do their jobs to help the detectives and criminalists on the streets solve cases, not the other way around.

That’s where Cavallo is one of the better ADs that the lab has had in recent years—in the sense that he is usually too lazy to personally involve himself in the day-to-day goings on with each shift and so permits Grissom and the other supervisors an incredible amount of free reign to manage their teams and caseloads as they see fit. Grissom can’t say that he and Cavallo are friends, but he doesn’t look forward to Cavallo’s impending retirement, either, as, chances are, whoever replaces him won’t be so easy to get along with.

Honestly, Grissom can’t remember the last time Cavallo called him in for a private discussion—maybe after the lab explosion. He takes a seat in the chair in front of Cavallo’s desk, and Cavallo offers him what he recognizes as an administrator’s smile: too calculated to really put anyone at ease, though that’s what it’s meant to do.

“You like golf, Grissom?” Cavallo says. Grissom quirks an eyebrow but doesn’t reply. He is far too exhausted to pretend to care about inanities right now, so he hopes Cavallo has some reason for this sit-down beyond the immediate question. Cavallo doesn’t seem to register his silence as an annoyed one. He goes on, genially. “I hate golf, but my wife says I need to find a hobby, or else I’m going to drive her crazy once we’re retired.”

“You could get a boat,” Grissom says. “Lake Mead is lovely.”

Cavallo misses his wryness. “That’s not a bad idea.” Then, more seriously. “Grissom, how long have you been supervising the night shift now?”

“Three years, eight months, and three days, counting today.”

He knows the date by heart, though he downplays to himself the reason why.

“Almost four years. Huh. You given any thought to applying for the AD spot once I’m gone?”

“Uh, no.”

“You should consider it,” Cavallo says. “It’s not great money but better than a shift position. More hands-off. Plus, you wouldn’t have to work nights or cozy up with all those stiffs.”

Being diplomatic is not Grissom’s strong suit, but he knows better than to tell Cavallo what he thinks about administrative positions while the man is still technically his boss. He demurs as politely as he can. “I don’t know that I’m the right guy for that job,” he says—a statement that is truthful enough, in itself.

But Cavallo isn’t as easily deterred as he expected. He stares at Grissom from across the desk, his expression surprisingly urgent, even intense. “That doesn’t mean you’d be the wrong guy,” he says, “—where somebody else who applies might be.”

The conversation has taken a turn for the cryptic, and Grissom is too tired to think through the actual substance of what Cavallo is intimating, so he deflects with a proverb.

_“‘Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.’”_

“Or even a devil you know but can’t trust in the same way you could trust yourself,” Cavallo says, supposing that Grissom has caught his gist. The conversation seems to be over, so Grissom starts to rise, but he doesn’t get far. Cavallo stops him. “Wait, Grissom. One more thing: I was going over your monthly report, and you haven’t updated the status on the CSI Sidle’s PEAP sessions since May. What’s going on there? I need to check the ol’ box.”

Grissom halts where he stands.

During his initial discussion with Sara after she got pulled over, he told her she needed to schedule some counseling, but that was a month ago, and he hasn’t discussed the matter with her since. He is certain that, somewhere in the department handbook, there is a policy regarding the timeline for compliance when mandatory sessions are assigned, and he’s also certain that the policy essentially amounts to “Complete them sooner, rather than later.”

But Grissom hasn’t wanted to hassle her about whether or not she has attended or even scheduled her sessions yet. Counseling is a personal matter, something that no one really has a right to know about, except for Sara and her counselor. God knows she doesn’t need some arbitrary administrative hoop to jump through right now and that she shouldn’t have to answer to him about her emotional state, considering the situation. He wouldn’t even know how to ask her about a topic so delicate, not when he can hardly even engage in simple conversation with her these days. If he can’t manage to ask her how she’s doing, how could he presume to make her brief him on her most intimate thoughts and feelings? He has no place. He has no right.  

Unable to make these admissions to Cavallo, he gives the simpler answer: “We, uh, haven’t discussed it since they were assigned to her.”

Cavallo frowns and waits for more explanation. When Grissom doesn’t offer any, he shakes his head. “Well, you need follow up with her, and make sure that she gets on it.” He seems to sense Grissom resisting him. His frown deepens. “Look, I don’t want to ride anybody’s ass, but she needs to get on it, or else—” He stops short of actually delivering the ultimatum, but the implication flags between him and Grissom, as if it were a banner.

Grissom’s pulse increases, and something sets in his stomach like drying cement. “The sessions aren’t punitive, Robert,” he says coolly. “She’s been on vacation, and she’ll schedule them when she’s ready. I’ll let you know when you can check off your box.”

Poor as his political instincts are, Grissom realizes that he may have just stepped over a line. Catherine’s right: When it comes to Sara, he takes things personally, gets defensive. His words in themselves were terse, and his tone was even terser, bordering on belligerent. He remains motionless, waiting for Cavallo to reprimand him.

Thankfully, Cavallo doesn’t seem to want to press the matter—though whether that’s due to his characteristic laziness or because he is convinced that Sara will be compliant, Grissom can’t say. He nods, amazingly placid.

“Send me a memo,” he says, granting Grissom leave.

For him, that’s the end of it.

But it isn’t for Grissom.

For as adamant as he was in assuring Cavallo that Sara would adhere to department policy and eventually schedule the sessions, Grissom isn’t actually sure that she will—much less that she’ll tell him when she does.

Sara isn’t typically a rebel, but she is a free spirit, and she does resent policies that she views as misinformed, redundant, or prohibitive to her doing her job. It’s another way that she and Grissom are similar: They both have a low tolerance for bad management and feel that their responsibility as criminalists is not to the administration but to discern the truth.

Grissom doesn’t know what Sara’s thoughts are on mandatory peer counseling, but he fears that she could view it as superfluous or even offensive.

Honestly, Grissom feels uncomfortable telling Sara that she has to attend counseling, particularly given that he has never undergone any sort of counseling himself. Somehow, he has made it through his entire career in law enforcement without ever attending a session, either by mandate or his own volition. He knows, in theory, what counseling would entail, and he acknowledges psychiatry for the science that it is, but he also knows that he wouldn’t be well-suited for any kind of talk counseling.

Discussing his personal thoughts and feelings is difficult enough, even with the people who matter most to him. He can hardly imagine having to make that kind of intimate conversation with a stranger. Though he would like to believe that he could be forthcoming and accept the advice of someone with expertise in the field, he knows better: If the counselor asked an incisive question, he wouldn’t be able to answer, even if he wanted to, and part of him would resist the imposition.

Sara is such a guarded person. He wonders if she shares his aversion. He pictures her sitting in strained silence until the clock on the wall indicates that the session is officially over or else being flippant with the counselor in the way she can sometimes be when she feels attacked.

Even if she were more open to counseling than Grissom is, he worries that she wouldn’t want to report to him on the outcomes of her sessions. He knows that there is more to what happened with her than just a poor decision involving alcohol—that she is facing something vaster and deeper than a bad call on a rough night. He also knows that he is in many ways complicit in her current trouble.

It is a cruelty of the system and of their complicated situation that she should have to report to him on the damage he has done her.

Grissom wants to course-correct. He isn’t so naïve as to think that he can undo all the mistakes he has made with Sara over the last four years, but he does want to prevent himself from making more mistakes with her—to become an anodyne influence in her life, if he can.

She probably needs many things right now, but at least one of those things is a friend: someone who’ll listen to her and not pressure her into anything, who will advocate for her now, when her voice is so quiet and small, and support her once she finally finds her ability to speak freely for herself again. Prudence and policy say that Grissom should push her onto others—counselors and administrators who can give her a particular kind of help. But since he is part of the problem with her, he has to be part of the solution. He can’t turn his back on her, no matter what Catherine and Cavallo would tell him to do.

He’ll have to make some rules for himself: do more listening than speaking; be kind but checked; don’t take any action with her that he wouldn’t likewise take with Nick, Warrick, or Catherine; respect whatever boundaries she sets; give more than he takes; and, above all, keep from falling more in—

On the day the Los Angeles seminar concludes, the team gets called in at four in the afternoon. The other shifts are all tapped out, and there’s a multiple homicide in Henderson and the fallout from a high speed cops-and-robbers chase down the highway in Seven Hills, leading away from a bank, so they’re on, whether or not they want to be.

Both scenes are supposed to be messy.

Grissom doesn’t expect to see Sara until later at night, at the official start of grave. But then he grabs his vest from his locker, rounds the corner to reception, and, suddenly, there she is: Greg Sanders to her right, Warrick to her left, and the bright sunlight of midsummer illuminating the glass doors behind her, framing her in white. She isn’t smiling, isn’t laughing, just standing with one arm propped on the desk, listening to something Greg is saying and wearing a neutral expression.

In the split second before she notices Grissom’s presence, he feels like he did on an occasion, when, as a young boy, his mother took him to St. Vibiana’s for the celebration of High Mass. It was an early Sunday evening, and the cascading glow and resplendent angel figures in the pristine church captivated him. He fixated on the prisms and refractions playing across the marbled altar, on the dust motes suspended in midair, more interested in the science of light than he ever was in God. He wanted to know how the light worked, where it had come from, where it was going.

Back then, he couldn’t concentrate on the introit well enough to translate it into ASL for his mother. He could only stare. Now, with Sara, the same: the church, reception; the light identical; the angels and the altar, her; his watching her, another secret idol in his disobedient heart.

The memory and longing come to him before he can shut them out, and Sara seems somehow to feel them—his eyes on her, blaspheming—and quickly looks up, finding him though Greg and Warrick still have her ear.  

She still wears the same heartbreak in her expression that was there before she left, but she also appears well, healthier than she was the last time Grissom saw her, in countenance, at least, with some color in her complexion and even, finally, in her clothing. Until this moment, Grissom had forgotten that today was the seasonal equinox, but, seeing her, he remembers. She looks like summer—looks like light—and as he fumbles through making his assignments to the team, these thoughts and the image of her stay with him, like the recitation of vespers, seared into his memory.

He sends her to Henderson with Warrick and himself takes Catherine and Nick to Seven Hills, purposefully separating himself and Sara from each other so that he can keep from staring at her too much. She accepts the assignment without complaint, and he thinks to himself that it was only that she surprised him—that he hadn’t expected to see her yet—that’s why he reacted so intensely to her. Just give him tonight to get a grip on himself, and tomorrow he can be her friend, the thing she needs. He won’t gawk. He’ll just listen. He’ll obey his own rules.

_Et in saecula saeculorum. Amen._

On the second night after Sara arrives back in Vegas, Grissom partners with her on a body dump case. As they drive together to the site, he tests himself, seeing if he can be in her presence, alone with her, at last, without breaking his rules.

Early on during their drive, he is polite though amiable, his questions appropriate, his manners well-remembered. But then in the act of listening to her, he feels something start to slip inside him and give way. There are streetlights on her side of the highway only, and they blur beyond her window into a streak of neon white, an aureole framing her profile. He sits in the darkness, watching her, wanting.

Maybe that’s part of why Grissom was never a good Catholic: he couldn’t abide rules that would tell him how to live, and though he could examine his conscience, make confession, and perform the prescribed acts of reparation, he could never determine in his heart to go his way and sin no more.

Even as a child, he allowed his captivations to rule him. Now that he is a grown man, captivated again, he does the same.

She’s talking to him tonight, maybe for the first time since he brought her home from PD a month ago—about classes she took in high school and at Harvard, her thoughts on growing up in California, little things. Now that he is close to her, he sees she bears a fresh sunburn blush on her arms and shoulders and a spangling of freckles across the bridge of her nose. He can’t stop staring at her as if he knew he had only an hour left to retain his sight, and she were the last thing he had ever chosen to see.

He only meant to ask she how was doing, but now that he has got her going, he can’t bring himself to either steer or stop the conversation. He missed her while she was in Los Angeles—felt starved of her—and now that he has her back, he just wants to listen to her speak about anything and everything; to laugh and smile when they trade jokes; to just pass the night with her; to be her company.

“You got some sun in LA,” he tells her. “It brings out your freckles.”

He says the words adoringly, worshipfully, which is how he feels for her, though he shouldn’t, and her reaction is instantaneous: a smile that is both diffident and delighted, like the one she first showed him on the day they met in San Francisco. He has spent ever since trying to collect such smiles from her, as if they were rare butterflies for a favorite shadowbox.

The more he and Sara talk, the more Grissom feels himself fast approaching the boundaries he has set, and he knows that he should stop—that he has no right to her like this, to this candor, to her warm affection. He starts to tell her stories about his adolescence, his childhood home, his mother, but all those things feel so far away when she is here with him.

Present.

What he wants is to make her smile, and he does, and he adores her too much. She makes a joke to him about how surely he must feel a little bit at home when he goes to California to visit his mother, and though he had set rules for himself, though he had sworn that he would give and not take, that he would be only her friend, that he wouldn’t overstep, he says, without thinking, “Vegas is home for me nowadays”—and what he means is that he hadn’t felt at home all week until just now, when she is with him, and they’re talking like they used to.

—and just like that, he’s broken all his rules.

So another course-correction, another recalibration.

Time and distance is what he recommended for Sara, so he takes his own advice: If he can’t be her friend up close, then he’ll have to be her friend from a distance. After they wrap their body dump case, he makes new rules. No more taking her with him to his scenes, partnering with her, or candid conversations. He entrusts her supervision to Catherine and sends himself off on solo cases in an attempt to clear his head.

On the day Sara leaves for her third vacation, he walls himself up in his office and purposefully refrains from telling her goodbye. He has no idea where she’ll spend her time away from the lab, but he likes to imagine her getting out of town. It’s maybe too much to hope she’ll fly to California again—airplane tickets don’t grow on trees—but he wants her to have a nice vacation somewhere, regardless. There’s always Reno or one of the resorts in the mountains. Someplace she could drive to, where it would be quiet and she could be in nature.

He likes the idea of Sara beneath pine trees and stars. She’s mentioned to him before that she finds the wilderness soothing. It’s another likeness they share, something that in another world and another life could be a bond, a joint recreation. He decides to place her there in his mind, somewhere in the mountains, a place where she could go hiking and have room to breathe.

As the shift changes, he rescues the folded paper with her name on it from his desk drawer. With his fountain pen, he begins to write what he hopes is a friendly letter that will find her well once she returns from wherever she’s going. He considers each word before he commits it to the page, using the old tripartite litmus test: is it true, is it necessary, and is it kind? He tries not to say anything too personal or revealing. He only wants her to know that she’ll be missed while she’s away.

—and he does miss her.

In her absence, he hurls himself into his work, pulling three doubles in four days and even turning to his fish board when he runs out of active cases to investigate. Nick calls him a machine, and Greg asks him to his face if he actually lives at the lab now. During the few hours when he’s not either in his office or in the field, he walks his dog, watches baseball, and writes a letter to the editor at one of the academic entomology journals to which he subscribes, taking issue with their recent report regarding the taxonomic classification of a particular species of coastal butterfly.

He tells himself that the busier he is, the less he thinks about Sara. But, in truth, she is still on his mind, even while he’s attending his fourth autopsy in twenty-three hours and watching the Dodgers beat the Giants, 2-1, off a Jayson Werth homer in the bottom of the fifth. She’s with him as he drives to his crime scenes, when he’s arguing butterflies, and while he’s in his office, combing through his books, looking for pieces to his many and exhausting puzzles.

He’s chewing over what to do—wondering if he should recommend that Sara take even more time for herself when she gets back from this vacation, if he is ready to talk to her and behave, or if he should still keep his distance, bide his time, and keep trying to rein himself in. He’s also simply thinking of her: of what she would say about this particular case development and what she would do if she were with him, swabbing that bloodstain or running those phone records.

Somehow, Sara has become omnipresent for him. If someone were to dust the rooms of his life, they would find her fingerprints everywhere, on everything, even on parts of his existence he thought she had never before touched.

Her return comes both too soon and not soon enough, in that Grissom still hasn’t decided anything by the night she has her first shift back, but he is still gladdened to have her company again in an implicit, reflexive way. He finds her in the break room, getting coffee before callouts.

“Hey,” she says, noticing his presence before he can say a word. “You want a cup? It’s fresh.” She offers him the pot, but he declines her with the wave of his hand.

Her LA sunburn has faded, and she’s back to black clothing, but Grissom can’t gauge her mood based on these changes in appearance alone. He needs to see her face and look into her eyes, but she’s too much in motion, setting down the coffee pot now that he has declined it, picking out a stirrer from the communal supply, finicking with her drink. At first he thinks that she’s just in a hurry to get back to working cases, but as he continues to watch her, he realizes that her constant movement is indicative of nervousness—that she is busy outside because she feels busy inside.

He starts to ask, “Did you—?”

But she talks at the exact same time. “Can I—?”

They both stop, and he gestures for her to say what she will, conceding the conversational right of way. She laughs at the awkwardness but sounds somehow helpless.

“Sorry,” she says. “Can I get around you?” She ducks her head and is shy. He steps aside to let her pass, and she starts toward the door, but then stops. “I was—was, uh, gonna go with Warrick tonight, if that’s okay with you. He’s got that case—the, uh, murder-suicide at the Excalibur. He said he could use a hand.”

Finally, eye contact, just the fleetest instant of it. Her expression is strangely bashful, like she isn’t certain she’s said the right thing. She glances quickly away again.

“Sure,” Grissom says.

With his leave, she disappears down the hall, coffee cup in hand, and he watches after her, uncertain concerning what’s just happened between them. She didn’t seem scared of him—not in the same way she was when he brought her back to her apartment—but she was flighty, almost timid.

Grissom has never been as socially adroit as some people are—say Catherine or Warrick—but he can’t shake the impression that Sara was avoiding his eyes not because she didn’t want to see him but because she didn’t want him to see something particular in her. She was hiding from him, and he doesn’t know why.

What he does know, having stood in her presence again, is that he still isn’t ready to play by his own rules, that even that brief interaction has left him wanting more of her company.

So he tries to give her space. Deny himself.

She spends her first two days back working the double at the Excalibur with Warrick, and then she pairs with Catherine to take an arson case at a convenience store in Northtown. Grissom speaks no more than seven words to her in total on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday combined, and he even keeps his distance from her passing in the hallways, tech labs, and locker room.

Due to sheer exhaustion, he is finally forced to go home, to rest and recharge his brain. During his hours away from the lab, he sleeps deeply, and, if he dreams, he doesn’t remember what of when he awakes. He is performing well, for the moment, functioning, focusing, doing what needs to be done, not dwelling too much on anything.

Not dwelling too much on her.

But then Sunday comes, and it’s the Fourth of July—a notoriously busy holiday for Clark County law enforcement due to an increase in tourism and local celebration, causal to innumerable fireworks incidents, poor decisions fueled by alcohol, domestic disputes at family gatherings, and flagrant theft and violence punctuating the citywide revelries.

Nick went home to Texas for the weekend, so it’s just Grissom, Catherine, Warrick, and Sara on call, and they’re all in by nine in the morning, with the day and swing shifts already tapped. At first, it seems that each criminalist will be working his or her own solo case: Grissom takes an assault at the MGM pool party, Catherine processes an off-Strip trick roll, Warrick covers a string of shop heists on the Venetian Palazzo, and Sara investigates a dead bum bearing multiple knife wounds found naked and straddling the meridian halfway down Tropicana.

With the city packed to bursting and the heat index hovering above a mean hundred, Grissom expects that each case will segue immediately into another case without pause, and he isn’t wrong: Catherine calls him midway through the afternoon to say she wrapped the trick roll, and she’s headed to Bonelli Landing at Lake Mead with Vartann to process a drunken boating accident with four fatalities; Warrick recovers the stolen merchandise and has the heist ringleader in custody by six o’clock, so he and Vega start on a biker brawl turned gunfight at a dive bar; Grissom has his own case solved shortly afterwards, when he gets a message from Jim Brass reporting that ATV riders discovered a mangled body in the desert about ten miles outside the city.

Jim can’t go with Grissom to the scene or meet him there but has Officer Mitchell assigned to detail and waiting whenever Grissom is ready. Escaping the Strip and getting out of town takes Grissom nearly an hour, and by the time he manages to break free from the traffic, he’s headed hard into the sunset, due west with a searing glare in his eyes.

The scene is located on a rise in the desert, off a nondescript stretch of road leading into the red rock foothills. When Grissom heard the word “mangled,” he anticipated that things would be messy, but he’s still surprised when he sees the extent of the trauma to the body, which appears to have been disarticulated at every joint, then eviscerated, and then spread out over an area roughly the length of a football field.

Even now, with the sun fast descending over the horizon and darkness spreading like spilled ink across the Mojave, he can see that some of the damage to the body appears to have been done by animals, though there is also a human element to the carnage—some telltale indications of tool usage and an unmistakable purposefulness to what would otherwise seem like random chaos.

Many of the body parts lie out in the open, plain to see, but some of them are obscured beneath patches of desert sage and scrub brush. If Grissom has to process the entire scene by himself in the dark, he isn’t going to sleep again until Tuesday, so he sends out a group text asking for the next person to wrap a case to join him at their soonest availability.

David Phillips shows up ten minutes after he sends his SOS, and as they start to discuss how best to clear the body for pickup, he becomes distracted. He isn’t thinking about who will respond to his text—just about the logistics of processing what is probably two hundred pounds of human flesh strewn out across a hundred yards of desert. Ultimately, they decide that it will be best for Grissom to photograph and mark each individual body part before starting any collection.

Since the crime scene is remote, and Grissom knows that Jim needs all hands on deck within city limits tonight, he dismisses Officer Mitchell, telling him he’ll radio if he needs anything. After a few more minutes, he also allows David to head back to the morgue.

“No use keeping you here while I’m gridding,” he says, grimacing, and David nods, appreciative.

“I’ll see you in the morning, Dr. Grissom,” he says, and from anyone else, it would be a wry comment, but from him it is genuine and harmless.

He shoulders his bag and starts back to his van, leaving Grissom crouched above what appears to be the victim’s gallbladder, impaled on a hedgehog cactus. Grissom listens to him go, expecting to hear the opening and closing of the van doors and the rev of the engine not soon afterwards.

Instead, an engine already running approaches up the highway. Gravel cracks and pops beneath heavy tires, and light floods the crime scene from behind. The vehicle slows to a stop, and the lights kill a half second before the engine does. A door opens and slams, indicating that Grissom’s backup has arrived.

“Oh, hey, Sara,” David says brightly.

“Hey.”

“I’d watch my step if I were you.”

“Thanks.”

Grissom’s heartbeat picks up in his chest. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to him that Sara could be the one to respond to his distress call. The beam from her flashlight finds him through the dark, falling bright on his back and then brighter on his face as he turns to see her. Though she takes careful, measured steps across the desert, she still makes quick progress, joining him beside the gallbladder.

“Sorry it took me so long to get here,” she says, standing over him. “The Strip is a mess.” A pause as she surveys the gore. “Not to say that this isn’t.”

Now the slam of David’s van door and the rev of his engine. His high beams suddenly on, performing strange ballet over the scene as he makes a three-point turn onto the road, casting everything in sharp, momentary chiaroscuro before quickly relinquishing it again to the dark. He’s gone after a moment, which means that Grissom and Sara are alone together.

Grissom’s pulse pounds in his ears, and, for as much as he would try to deny it, a thrill rises in his chest as if it were a falcon riding a thermal above the desert. The sun has fully set now, but the ground beneath him still radiates heat, and he feels himself radiate heat, as well. It rolls off his skin in droves and increases as he takes Sara in.

Standing behind her flashlight, she is mostly concealed from him, the nuances of her expression partially obscured by the night. But the stars have begun to ascend the heavens over her shoulder, and they’ve become white flowers in the dark, pure garden of the sky. They frame her in a floral circlet, casting her regal even under the gloom. She wears drapery made of the Milky Way over her shoulders, and, in the absence of the moon, which lies concealed behind the distant mountains, she seems to take center place in the cosmos, the entire universe constellated around her.

Nothing should be beautiful, given the circumstances of the case, but.

“What happened with the dead bum?” Grissom asks, reaching for something to say to her that will help him abide his rules.

Sara shrugs. “The guy he was sharing his lean-to with in the alley shanked him ’cause he was trying to buy fireworks, and he thought they’d both get arrested for it. Roomie had priors, didn’t want to go down for illegal possession, so he killed the victim, wrapped his body in a garbage bag, and loaded it onto the flatbed of some guy’s pickup truck. Truck owner didn’t close the flap on the bed, so the bag rolled off, and the body ended up on the meridian. Both the homeless guys were junkies. Paranoid. And you know what’s really sad? This is the one week a year when it is legal to buy fireworks in Clark County. I mean, we’re talking sparklers here. It’s just—” She trails off. “Anyway, Roomie’s in lockup.” She shakes her head. Then. “What do you want me to do: put down the markers or take overalls?”

The endearment slips out before Grissom can think twice of it: “Whatever you prefer, my dear.”

In the seconds after he says the words, both he and Sara remain still, motionless and stoked as rabbits aware of a circling hawk. He hears Sara take three short, gasping breaths. Then, she moves, carrying the beam from her flashlight with her, away from him. She’s five paces off before she says back over her shoulder, “I’ll mark.”

For all its previous racing, Grissom’s heart barely seems to beat at all now. He remains crouched near the warm earth for several more long seconds, feeling as if he’s forgotten how to breathe.

“Okay,” he says weakly, once he finally finds his voice again.

They process the scene in silence, Sara working ahead of Grissom, moving in an even a grid pattern across the desert terrain, setting down numbered indicators wherever she finds human remains. Grissom follows after her, photographing the evidence at each marker and making basic sketches of the carnage, indicating individual parts. One track in his mind focuses on the case, the other on his own unbelievable foolhardy. He can’t imagine what Sara must think of him, how uncomfortable she must feel—

She stops where she stands, turning to look back in his direction. Her eyes aren’t on him, so he follows her gaze and sees that she’s looking out over the Las Vegas Valley splayed below—to the city ten miles in the distance, where the casinos along the Strip have now begun their holiday fireworks displays. Elemental flame bursts above the familiar skyline, blooming in red, blue, green, purple, and neon yellow flowers across the otherwise white, wild garden of the heavens. Each explosion leaves behind skeletal smoke remains, which move like cartwheeling spiders across the stratosphere. But these are quickly eclipsed by fresh bombardments, by more brightness and crackling colors.

“Wow,” Sara says, crouching down amid the desert scrub, her eyes locked on the spectacle. “I think we have a better view than anyone on Vegas Boulevard.”

“Yeah,” Grissom says, but even his single syllable breaks his rules.

They’re far enough away from the city that they’re beyond its light pollution. Though they can see the fireworks in the distance, they remain themselves under a dark firmament populated by stars and the faint, wan band of the wider, unresolved galaxy. While Grissom certainly sees the pyrotechnics from the city, what he sees most of all is Sara, kneeling before a backdrop of outer space, existing just beyond the edge of the Las Vegas lights. She has momentarily turned off her flashlight, but the astral glow from above illuminates her well enough that she remains perceptible to him in silhouette, beautiful and steely under cover of dark.

This view is the one he likes best, the one that he could watch for hours.

For forever, maybe.

But he shouldn’t. He has no right.

Religious mysticism tells him that light overcomes darkness—cosmically, spiritually—that there is holiness in the sun, moon, and stars and evil in the vale of shadow. But, scientifically, he knows things are more complicated.

Ostensibly, darkness is not its own entity. Darkness is the scarcity or absence of light, only understandable according to its opposite.

Conceptually, darkness cannot exist where there is light in abundance, so light does prevail. But physically, in certain instances, darkness actually consumes light.

A dark object, such as a black hole, devours photons, its gravitational force so immense that passing light rays cannot escape its field and are either swallowed up or bent from their original forms. In fact, black holes cannot exist without the consumption of light. Quantum physics show that black holes start to evaporate as some of the light particles and antiparticles approaching them manage to fly off into space, just before crossing the event horizon into their voracious and otherwise inescapable maws. This escaping light creates the illusion of a halo around the black hole. It represents lost potential energy. The light that forms this perpetual glow decreases the mass of the black hole over time, until finally the black hole ceases to exist.

It’s one of the paradoxes of the universe: that darkness craves light but also kills it and, in killing light, so will itself die.

Grissom had never considered himself a particularly selfish person before he met Sara, but now he knows he is—he can’t avoid this reality as he stares at her, framed on the limens between the electric city and the boundless, wild black of the universe.

He once freely offered himself to her: his care, his time, his person. But then he rescinded, and she asked him to reconsider—to give to her as he once had done, as he had intimated that he would do when he first asked her to move to Las Vegas. He couldn’t give her what she asked for, though. Or he wouldn’t. The verbs tangle in his head. In any case, he told her no, and that should have been it. If he was never going to give her what she needed, then he should have walked away. He should have stopped taking from her, stopped stealing.

But here he is, a year later, still devouring her precious light.

Though Sara seems in awe of the fireworks, she also looks sad and stoic to him now, like she did as he drove her home on the morning she got pulled over. There’s heartbreak all over her but also resignation, as if she has become accustomed to the feeling and almost somehow finds it companionable, as if it were her old friend.

The truth is that she was different when she first moved to Las Vegas: more exuberant; confident; brighter, like a daystar. But over the years, Grissom has consumed that brightness and dragged her into the shadows with him. Black clothes. Dark lipstick. That heartbroken look in her eyes.

Some light still clings to her because that’s what she is—pure light—and the moment that she loses all her light will be the moment that she ceases to be herself. That lingering light is what attracts him, captivating him, as a flame would a moth. He can’t resist that quality in her, even though he has no right to it.

What Grissom must admit to himself, though he hates to, is this: that he has always wanted Sara to himself in darkness; that even though he knows he’s hurting her, keeping her at a distance from him, he also can’t bear to completely relinquish her from his life, so he retains her trapped in his gravity. He hates himself for needing her so much, and he would never forgive himself if he were ever to truly shroud her over.

To kill off the last of her light.

He wants to be better for her. Less cowardly and less selfish. He wants to be her friend. But he doesn’t know if he’s capable, if he could ever make himself into someone who would be good enough for her in any way. He has always been too much a dark object.

“How has it been, getting away from the lab?” he asks.

It is the question he has meant to pose to her ever since that first week she took off at the end of May, but somehow the inflection comes out wrong. He’s not asking only whether or not she has enjoyed her vacations but how she fares during them, not having work to fill the long lonelinesses of her life.

Their lives.

Their life.

The pronouns, plurals, and singulars tangle in his head.

She has always been braver than he is, and he needs to hear from her—needs her to tell him that sometimes stepping off into the unknown is the right thing to do.

She remains silent for a long time, until he thinks that maybe she won’t answer him at all. But then she says, “I dunno. I mean, I haven’t been going anywhere, except LA that one time. I’ve been here, in town, just trying to, uh—just trying to get some stuff figured out. I went to one of those sessions with the, uh—with the counselor—the PEAP, and—” Her sentence fizzles out like one of the fireworks over the city. She’s started moving again, fidgeting with the marker at her feet.

“How is it?” Grissom asks but then instantly clarifies, “—staying home, I mean?”

Sara laughs and again sounds helpless, like she did the other day in the break room. “I think I’m going stir-crazy,” she admits. A pause. She fidgets more with the marker before finally standing and turning away from the fireworks shows, by now in the last minutes of their grand finales over the casino spires. She brushes the dust from her pants and stares at Grissom through the dark.

“Why not go somewhere?” he asks.

“Like where?” she says, and though she probably means the question to be a wry one, it comes out small and strangely genuine, as if she has no idea where to go in the world, and she wants desperately for him to tell her.

He considers for a moment. “I’d go someplace that reminds me there are bigger things out there than me,” he says, taking a tentative step towards her. She doesn’t flinch, so he takes another step. “The ocean. An old-growth forest.” He shrugs and indicates the red rock hills behind them and, beyond those, in the distance, Charleston Peak. “The mountains.”

“Someplace where you’ve got room to grow,” Sara offers.

“Exactly,” he says, closing the distance with a few more steps.

Now he is close enough to see Sara’s expression by the beam of his flashlight. She offers him one of her sad smiles. “You don’t like cities,” she surmises. “Too many people.”

He can’t deny her observation. He shrugs. Then, earnestly. “You should take another vacation. Really go somewhere this time. You’ve still got what? Seven and a half weeks?”

He expects that maybe she’ll resist the idea, but she doesn’t. She sighs. “Yeah,” she says. “Maybe I could take a road trip.”

“A road trip might be nice,” he says, unsure if she is humoring him or if she really means she’ll put in for another vacation.

He pictures her driving down the freeway, her window open and sunglasses on. He wonders, maybe, if it wouldn’t be best for her to drive away from Vegas and never come back. There are other cities and other jobs, other places where maybe she’d be happier, other people she could maybe be happier with. The selfish part of him doesn’t want her to even go looking, but the better part of him wants what is good for her, even if that isn’t him.

She flicks on her flashlight again, and they share a look, illuminated now. Whatever she feels about his suggestion, she isn’t hiding from him anymore. Her expression is open, not a smile but an acknowledgement. They hold each other’s gazes for maybe a few seconds too long.

“Thank you,” she says, and he doesn’t know what she is grateful to him for.

Still, he answers her. “You’re welcome.”

He wonders if he has finally passed his test—if he has finally said and done the right thing for her for once, regardless of his desires.

They process for another several hours in the dark. Their conversation is over, but they do talk at intervals about the evidence they find, reading out the scene. In addition to marking the body parts, they also cast plaster impressions of tire treads Sara discovers within their search area. When they’re close to having everything identified and photographed, Sara phones David, recalling him for pickup. He arrives an hour later along with Warrick, who hitched a ride with him, and the four of them commence gathering body parts into hazmat buckets.

Collecting the body parts isn’t a particularly involved task, but labeling the buckets and loading them securely into the coroner’s van is. Once they have everything gathered, the team decides that Warrick should get their rush evidence—a cigarette butt that may bear DNA from the body dumper and trace evidence swabbed from the underside of the victim’s right foot—back to the lab so that the techs can start running it, while Grissom and Sara remain behind to help David with cleanup.

Warrick takes the truck Sara drove to the scene back to the city, and everyone else forms an assembly line: Sara tags the buckets, Grissom logs and passes them into the van, and David battens them down with bungee cords. By the time they have everything collected and documented, it is nearly four in the morning, and Sara is yawning into the crook of her arm.

“You didn’t sleep after you worked the arson with Catherine, did you?” Grissom asks her.

“I got two hours,” she says, as if that were sufficient.

Though she downplays, Grissom can see her exhaustion: how slow her movements have become over the last small while, how bleary her eyes. “I’ll drive,” he offers, and, surprisingly, she doesn’t fight him—just goes to the passenger side of his truck and waits for him to unlock the door.

So they drive.

Initially, she tries to talk to Grissom, going down the canyon—mentioning they should do this task or run that test when they get back to the lab—but eventually she can’t keep up the conversation. The lights in the cabin of the truck are off, the city limits are still twenty minutes out, and she is fading quickly. She doffs her vest, bunches it into a ball, and uses it for a makeshift pillow, propped between her head and the window.

“You don’t mind?” she says, and Grissom shakes his head. “Thanks.” She closes her eyes.

It strikes Grissom, watching her in his peripheral vision, that even considering the whirlwind of their early relationship and everything they’ve done together since they first met, he has only ever observed Sara sleeping in stolen moments like this one—that they’ve never actually slept together, either in a bed or elsewhere. Sometimes he’ll find her hunched over the table in the break room or laid out on one of the wooden benches by the lockers, catching a quick nap between cases or while awaiting results from an experiment. She reminds him of a cat, in that she can seemingly sleep anywhere, no matter how uncomfortable. She always looks so serious, sleeping, like she is thinking hard thoughts, even in states of repose.

Despite how tired she is tonight, it seems to take her some time to fully drift off. She shifts where she sits and adjusts and readjusts the vest under her head. At first, her movements are cognizant and purposeful, even though her eyes are closed, but eventually she starts to reposition herself unselfconsciously, curling up in her seat.

When Grissom sees that she has her arms wrapped around herself and that she seems to be shying away from the cold air blowing from the A/C, he reaches over on the dash to turn the panels away from her. She doesn’t react to his arm, and, a few seconds later, she makes a sound—a small, voiced hum from the back of her throat, a natural and unchecked expression of satisfaction—and his chest aches again, proving that whatever wound he bears for her has not yet sutured shut.

“Sweet dreams,” he says, as if the words were a prayer.

Instantly, he knows that it isn’t just one test he’ll have to pass on a singular occasion, standing on a lonesome stretch of desert earth, but infinite tests in infinite moments, for as long as they’re in each other’s lives, and that this test—this moment—is one he has failed, whether she or anyone else ever knows that he has or not. They’re under the stars and now finally also the moon, still miles beyond the glow from the city. Darkness shrouds them, and she is dreaming, and the truth is this:

He is at home with her here in the shadows, and he still loves her so much it breaks his heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So in my life outside the internet, I am a university professor. My semester has started now, which means that my updates may start to be once every few weeks as opposed to once a week. I'll try to stay on schedule as much as I can and not leave you hanging too long, but life happens sometimes, so just a heads-up.


	6. Chapter 6

**VI.**

Sara can do anything she has to do to survive, no matter how unpleasant.

So she sits on the edge of her couch. So she draws a long breath through her teeth. So she dials the number that the officer on the answering machine. When she reaches the receptionist for the PEA program, she speaks in an animated tone, asks for her options, sets the date, and says thank you—fucking _thank you_ —to end the call. She slumps onto the cushions. Lies with the phone clutched in her hand. Feels as if she has taken a sharp kick to the gut.

Self-loathing swamps in the pit of her stomach. She should be smart enough to get over this trouble she has gotten herself in without help. She should be smart enough to transcend. Being smart is the only reason she has made it this far.

It’s just that now her smarts are failing.

There are a thousand things she should and does know better than to do, but she can’t seem to help herself. She is still subject to her compulsions and emotions, cagey like an animal, so prone to making stupid choices.

Repeating so many family mistakes.

Her father and mother left her unprepared—they ruined her perceptions, so she can’t tell how much affection, distance, and dissonance are normal in a relationship and can’t trust herself to do what is right or what is normal. She wants to stand from where she is now and howl backwards at them through the long tunnel of time, to curse at them and scream, facing them as an adult in a way that she never could as a child.

It’s a stupid thing for anyone to want to do, because the past is stone, immutable, but that is still what she feels, what she longs for.

She’s getting worse, she can tell—and Grissom can tell, too, which is maybe why he’s backed off so far and can’t seem to stand to talk to her. Of course, she doesn’t blame him. She’s still languishing and acting strange. She still can’t get over him.

So what if during that final interview on the Marlin case he expressed remorse for turning her down? He never meant for her to hear what he said, and what he said doesn’t change anything between them. If he really regretted what had happened after the lab explosion, he would have done something to change it by now.

But he hasn’t.

Doesn’t.

Besides, he is still her supervisor, and she is still a mess. Only a teenager would think that the fact that two people are attracted to each other means that they should end up together. An adult should know better.

Sara should know better.

She is furious at herself that she doesn’t—that she can’t make her heart agree with her head, even after so many years. Her insides feel like a junk drawer filled with screws, wire, and scrap nails, all hooked together in a tight, sharp knot. It would be bad enough if he weren’t her boss, but he is. He is her direct supervisor, which means that she is one of those girls. She is embarrassing herself and cutting off any potential support system she might have, and, if she keeps up at the rate she is going, she’ll sink her career.

Everything has started to unravel around her, a tapestry coming apart at the weave. Brass caught her buzzed at a scene at the beginning of the year. Catherine has noticed her shirking rough assignments. Even Greg can sense that there’s something up with her, and she still just can’t breathe, no matter how much time away from the lab Grissom allows her.

She scheduled her appointment for Wednesday morning—the final day of her vacation—knowing that she’ll need to build up to it and then take a few hours afterward to calm down again before she returns to the lab. Since the PEAP office offered her the option, she requested to see an off-site psychiatrist rather than one of the peer counselors from the department. In all likelihood, she won’t make any great divulgences, but if she does, she wants them protected, with no chance that they’ll get back to anyone at PD or CSI.

She spends Sunday afternoon on the couch, reading through the _JFS_ and half-heartedly considering the case studies at the back of each edition.

Working the body dump case with Grissom, she nicked her forearm on a spikey weed growing on the edge of the drainage ditch—nothing deep but still a scratch—and midway through the day, she realizes that she has stress-picked the scab and is bleeding onto the couch cushions. She cleans the mess with a flurry of _goddammits_ and drinks three beers afterward because why the hell not? She obviously needs something to take the edge off.

Monday, her anger subsides, replaced by doldrums and the kind of sadness that makes her feel like she needs to cry, though no tears will come. She knows she is too messed up to make a good companion for anyone, but she still wants for company, aching for someone to just stay with her and hold her through the night. She feels lonely in her shoulders, around her ribcage, at her waist, and over the crown of her head. She wants for physical contact, for muscle and warmth. For mass. For volume. For presence.

It’s been so long since anyone has held her. Even Hank didn’t, not really. She wants to tell herself that she can’t remember the last person who held her, but she can. She still remembers Reno, and she is stupid for remembering, because she and Grissom were outdoors and fully clothed, and nothing about the moment was inherently intimate. People who have only been and only ever will be friends sometimes hold each other that way, and it doesn’t mean anything. She shouldn’t be so stuck on it, so attached to the memory. She shouldn’t feel such pinpoint pain in her chest for wanting the moment back again, for wanting him to hold her just once more.

For missing him.

God.

Tuesday, she forces herself to clean out the bedroom closet, as she had meant to do during her first vacation. She makes slow progress, taking breaks every five or ten minutes, sometimes sitting on the floor with old sweatshirts and backpacks strewn around her on the carpet, other times pacing back and forth around her bed, running her hands through her hair and breathing hard through her teeth. The truth is, she doesn’t have that many things she needs to throw away. She has never been sentimental about belongings. To her, things are just things.

It’s only emotions she has difficulty letting go of.

Memories.

By the time Wednesday rolls around, she has become resigned.

The longing isn’t gone, and neither is the raw hurt, but she is reconciled to both feelings. She’ll probably never get over Gil Grissom, but she can be stoic about not having him—about being alone forever—because if she doesn’t have him, she will be alone forever.

She knows that now.

Her relationship with Hank stalled long before she found out Elaine Alcott existed, in part because she withheld from Hank just as much as he withheld from her. She never had any intention to tell him about her history, her family, and what her childhood and adolescence were like. The thought hadn’t once crossed her mind, even after they’d been dating for over a year.

She never imagined a future with him, never imagined anything between them changing. She was content with their weekday dates to the movies and occasional weekend dates elsewhere, with sex always at her place, with their insubstantial conversations that went nowhere and revealed nothing. She had no desire to move in with him or meet his friends or be his plus one to family weddings. Remaining in that nebulous place between casual dating and an actual relationship seemed fine to her. Half the time, she didn’t even want to refer to him as her boyfriend. Part of the appeal with Hank was that everything with him was superficial: he looked good, he fucked good, and he didn’t push her to disclose to him. He didn’t care or even notice that the only stories she ever told him were about work. Even though they had sex, nothing in their relationship was intimate.

That’s the way she’s always been with the men she has been with, and she doesn’t foresee herself changing or ever getting better—which is why it is inevitable that she’ll end up alone.

Grissom is the only person she has ever even considered telling her secrets to, and, even then, she has only entertained the consideration fleetingly, as a daydream.

Even if he were willing and able to give her what she wanted, she isn’t in a place to take him up on the offer, not when she is constitutionally incapable of trusting anyone, even him, with something that is so important to her makeup. She is just not the kind of person who can or should ever try to build a relationship with someone, and she needs to accept as much—needs to come to terms with the fact that her wanting something doesn’t mean that she should or ever will have it.

She thinks she can force herself, if she tries hard enough.

So she has to go to counseling, no matter how much she doesn’t want to.

Topics she will allow: feelings of inadequacy at work; poor decision-making, particularly in regards to alcohol consumption; a variety of failures, professional, personal, and in her character; her breakup with Hank; being cheated on, used.

Topics she will avoid: her family, her childhood, Grissom.

She doesn’t want medication. She doesn’t want continued counseling after these six sessions are complete. She isn’t going to lie about anything, but she also isn’t going to pick open old wounds, not when there is little chance she’ll be able to suture them closed again. If the counselor—or _shrink_ , really—can help her manage some of her symptoms, more power to him. She’ll take it. But she doesn’t expect the man to work miracles. These sessions are like an oil change in a car with a dying transmission: Eventually, no amount of maintenance will keep her going, and she won’t delude herself into believing otherwise.

The shrink’s practice is located in Spring Valley, far enough away from the lab that she has no reason to fear that a coworker might see her driving there. The shrink is affiliated with the PEA program but doesn’t work for the department, so the practice is his own. His office is located in a new development, a stone-faced designer complex, very New Age from the looks of things. She has never been there, but she feels like she has—feels like she has done all of this before.

She arrives at her destination fifteen minutes early and sits in her car, gripping the steering wheel even after she has long since killed the engine.

“C’mon,” she tells herself.

She has undergone enough therapy over the years that she knows exactly what to expect from this appointment. There is copious paperwork to fill out in the lobby, then finally meeting with the shrink in his office and making uncomfortable small talk while he sets down his first notes. He tries to convince her that he’s trustworthy, and she tries not to puke up her guts on his carpet. It is all intensely artificial. All so surreal and uneven.

The only thing that surprises her on this go-around is that the shrink looks like he is about her age, and she has never had a peer-aged shrink before. A quick glance at the diploma hung on his wall tells her he graduated from medical school a year after she finished her Master’s degree. She doesn’t know what the takeaway there should be. Maybe too much time has passed since she has last attended therapy. Maybe she is just getting older.

The guy still looks and acts like a shrink, so she supposes his age doesn’t make any difference. He spends the first ten minutes of the session talking up the purpose of PEAP and explaining why the LVPD offers the service to its law enforcement officers. Then he looks at her through his glasses.

“I see here that you were a referral through your department,” he notes, pointing to a spot on her chart with his pen. “Could you tell me what you were referred for?”

Since this topic is one she’ll allow, Sara answers easily. “Drinking and driving. They didn’t charge me with a DUI, but I got pulled over. Obviously, what I did would be illegal for anybody, but, uh, with law enforcement, I’m just lucky I didn’t lose my job. It was—I was being really stupid.”

The shrink makes note. “Okay, so that’s something we can talk about.”

“Yeah.”

“Are there any other subjects you want to talk about during our sessions?”

Sara shrugs. There are other subjects she is willing to talk about with this guy, but _want_ is a strong word, and she isn’t sure she is ready to itemize her issues to him just yet, even the ones she has deemed allowable. She wonders if there is a tactful way to tell him that what she really wants is a tune-up: just enough emotional maintenance to get her back on the road.

When she isn’t immediately forthcoming, he adjusts his question. “Have you, um, ever been to therapy before, or is this your first time?” he asks, mistaking her reticence for initiate’s jitters.

“I’ve been to therapy before,” she says. She rattles off the dates for him. “I went on and off from 1980 to 1986, again in 1989 and 1990, and, uh, 1992.”

He glances at her chart, checking if she has listed this information in her history. She has, but just dates and places, nothing more.

“Okay,” he says. He expects her to elaborate.

She smiles though she shouldn’t smile. Maybe what she’s doing is grimacing. She doesn’t know—can’t see herself from the shrink’s perspective. “Shitty parents,” she says, as if she were delivering the punchline to a joke. She doesn’t explain anything further, though, obviously, the shrink expects her to. He stares at her for a long time, waiting. Finally, he shifts in his chair.

“Look,” he says, setting down his notebook. “Sara, I’m not going to make you talk about anything you don’t want to. I get a lot of cops through here. I’ve seen thirty-year force veterans whose partners got killed in front of them, paranoid detectives, vice guys who’ve gotten in too deep—the works. They don’t want to talk to me. They just want to get their mandatories done and get back on the street, doing what they know how to do. So if that’s where you’re at, I get it. I’d like to help you accomplish some goals, if I can, but I’ll do it on your terms.”

Maybe he thinks his real talk will put her at ease and get her to disclose, but it doesn’t.

“Okay,” she says in a way that means _no_.

She doesn’t want to be recalcitrant or come across as a bitch, but she just can’t bring herself to say more, even for all her skill in forcing herself to do unpleasant things. She will sit in this room and fall on her sword a thousand times—tell this man over and over again how badly she screwed up, drinking and driving—but she won’t talk to him about her family or about what happened during her childhood. She has experienced success in therapy without making those divulgences before, and she intends to do the same now. All she wants is coping mechanisms.

The shrink nods. “We don’t have to talk about your history. We can stick with what’s current,” he says, as if they have struck a bargain. “You wanna tell me about what happened when you got pulled over?”

 _Want_ is still a strong word, but Sara tells him anyway, a patchwork version of the story: hard week, hard case; getting passed over for the promotion, then hearing the department nixed the promotion altogether; feeling—what?—like she can’t get her footing; having a couple beers after work to dull the sting; being uncertain if she was drunk or just buzzed; getting behind the wheel, in any case. The shrink listens but doesn’t say much. They’re still not really talking about anything yet. He is just trying to read her and sort his thoughts for next time.

Everything follows the script: at the end of the session, the shrink asks Sara if she thinks she would like to continue with him or if he should refer her to another provider on the PEAP network; she says she thinks he’ll be fine, so he starts chatting up a therapeutic plan and arranging for her next appointment; even though she hasn’t told him anything revealing yet, she feels as if she is coming down from a very high mountain and is overcome by a sense of precariousness. He shakes her hand.

“One down,” he says.

“One down,” she says, grimacing again though she should be smiling.

She forces herself to drive the speed limit on the way home, though her impulse is to race away from her appointment as if she were a child fleeing up the stairs from a monster in the basement.

Logically, she knows that the session went well—that the shrink was respectful of her boundaries, that the goals he set for their future meetings are of the type she wanted, and that she adhered to her own rules. But on a more visceral level, she feels again like she is making a fool of herself, and she is almost more anxious now that the session is over than she was before it began.

There are only so many reasons why a person would refuse to talk about her childhood to a shrink, so the guy has to know—has to have some inkling—what went on when she was growing up. He can look at her chart, do the math, see how old she was when she first started attending therapy. How stupid is she, trying to keep a secret that isn’t really a secret after all? She should just tell him the truth, shouldn’t she? Maybe he could help her.

But she can’t.

She drifts towards thinking about it now: about the last week in November, the Thanksgiving tourists come to town, the brilliant blue of the bioluminescent tides for the most part died away, leaving the beaches dark and lifeless. In flashbulb memory, she sees the light coming into her bedroom through the crack at the bottom of her door. She remembers loud voices fraying like old rope, carrying up through the floorboards from the downstairs. Then pounding on the walls along the stairwell, and the light going out. She had thought everything was over.

Until it wasn’t.

But she stops there, unwilling to give over to the reverie, only allowing herself to glimpse the images as if in her peripheral vision, not to look at them head-on, not to feel the accompanying emotions.

She parks her car in the lot at her complex and breathes out a long sigh. It’s eleven in the morning now, which means that she has twelve hours to calm herself down and prepare for her shift. She definitely needs to sleep or at least try to. She also needs to fully commit to the idea that she has to pull back from Grissom, to find some way to act normal around him. He’ll want to know how this vacation went, and she is going to have to find some way to report to him without acting like an idiot.

On her way to her mailbox, she mentally rehearses.

 _The quiet time was nice. I did some reading. Did you see that new_ JFS _article about—?_

She stops herself there. No. No extra questions. No striking up a conversation. Say only what requires saying and no more. Keep it simple, Sidle.

Again.

_It was nice. Quiet. I did some reading. Good to be back, though._

Better.

Mail in hand, she heads up the stairs to her apartment, thinking through order of operations: eat something, shower, sleep, take her time getting ready for work, go to work, tell Grissom she is fine, ignore whatever she feels for him, act normal, solve cases, stop bad guys, function, function, function, wash, rinse, repeat.

She lets herself in and tosses the mail onto the kitchen counter, then fumbles around the cupboards, searching for instant tea packets. It isn’t until she has her mug in the microwave that she leafs through the mail pile: a couple bills, some coupons, and handwriting—Grissom’s handwriting—her name and address penned in his familiar script on a thick envelope, bearing the department watermark.

Her first thought is that he’s firing her, but she immediately realizes that can’t be the case, not only because he wouldn’t fire her via letter but also because he wouldn’t fire her, period. It’s not in his nature to dismiss anyone on his team no matter how badly they’ve fucked up—and, regardless of his personal feelings toward her, she is still on the team, as much as Catherine or Nick or Warrick.

Her second thought, then, is that he is asking her to quit, which would be different than him firing her and something he might potentially do—a way by which he could offer her a sort of honorable discharge.

He could appeal to her pathos, asking her to think about whether or not she is truly happy in Las Vegas. He could promise her recommendations. He could frame his suggestion as the course of action that would be in her best interest. Make what he said thoughtful. Make what he said kind. Be careful with his written words in a way he maybe can’t be with his spoken ones.

Despite the department watermark on the envelope, the return address Grissom provided is his own, and the postmark zip code is from a post office in his neighborhood, not the one nearest the lab. Sara forces herself to breathe.

It takes her two tries to slit the seal on the envelope because her hands are unsteady. She fumbles producing the contents: multiple pages, folded over, sandwich style; every word, handwritten in script; lines upon lines, front and back on each page; small characters. She didn’t know what she had expected but not this—not what looks like five, no, six pages—a long letter, in fountain ink. Her heart is now a thick throb in her throat. She swallows hard and trembles unfolding the pages.

_Sara,_

_Admittedly, I have not read Dostoevsky since my college days, so particulars of the text elude me. Still, the questions the novel poses re. the consequences of rationalism resonate with me, as they do you. I, too, wonder to what extent the illogicality of humankind forms the crux of our responsibility for our actions—if the very fact that we do not always behave according to our own best interest is what allows us a form of individual autonomy._

_Even moths flying toward a porchlight act on what is essentially a survival instinct: in nature, they orient themselves according to the optical infinity of moonlight, but when they find their way into zones of human habitation, they mistake artificial light for the moon, despite the fact that it is not optically infinite, and fly towards it, unable to triangulate their own location. In circling the artificial light, they exhaust themselves or possibly go into a fugue state, confused by the unwavering brightness, their diurnal mechanisms thrown off. The same behavior that would normally help the moths to locate food, encounter potential mates, and avoid predators instead puts them in danger. Their flight is a mistake, but one made in an attempt at self-preservation and the perpetuation of their species._

_Human mistakes are more various. Sometimes, like the moths, we err making what under typical circumstances would be self-preservative or beneficial decisions, not knowing any better, but often we err by making decisions that are inherently self-destructive or destructive to our species as a whole. We can act selfishly, maliciously, and illogically. A man can choose to set fire to his own home with himself and his family inside, assured in advance that his actions will result in his and their deaths and even hoping for and reveling in this outcome. Mankind can build landfills and nuclear reactors, wage wars, and make use of deadly chemicals, knowing that we are destroying our planet for future generations. No other species, having an awareness of what behaviors and actions were in their own best interest, would willingly take other actions than those, let alone contrary or opposite ones._

_I struggle with the notion that sometimes I desire things which are harmful to me and harmful to others—even my friends and family._

_People I care about._

_However, I take some comfort in Dostoevsky’s notion that if science were able to uncover the laws governing human activity to the extent that it could discern and define humankind’s best interest, and we were, as a species, capable of always acting according to what was then by science deemed rational, we would cease to be autonomous creatures—and in some ways cease to be human. I think, as Dostoevsky says—and here I paraphrase, not having the novel in front of me and not having read it in 30+ years—a life without the possibility for irrationality would be “terribly boring.”_

_As much as I crave the rational, I can’t deny that some of the best and most interesting parts of my life have been those which rationalism cannot account for._

_Now I’m at home, and I’ve found my copy of the book. As would be expected, Dostoevsky elucidates what I mean to say more clearly than I can:_

_“Man, always and everywhere, whoever he is, has preferred to act as he wished and not at all as reason and advantage have dictated; one might even desire something opposed to one’s own advantage, and sometimes […] one positively must do so.”_

_Lately, I’ve been reading Shakespeare, and now I’m on to Anaïs Nin. What strikes me from my readings is that, in some cases, that which is flawed can be beautiful. Literary tragedy is nothing more than an expression of human irrationality, played out in story form, and it is the irregularity, the différence—a French word for you, per high school—inherent in tragedies which makes them intriguing to us, as well as, in some cases, instructive and even exquisite._

_That is not to say that pernicious actions are justified for the sake of their humanitas or according to whatever aesthetic value they may possess, of course. Only that I think, when I am most honest with myself, I must admit that I wouldn’t want to live in Dostoevsky’s Crystal Palace—or at least not live there permanently._

_I think that I want to, but I also know that I don’t. Paradoxical maybe?_

_You told me about your case—the body in the Bay, the fishermen angry about their torn nets when they should have been more horrified that they had found the remains of their lost crewmate, who had been murdered—and I’m reminded of a case I once worked, Catherine and I, maybe 12 y.a., @ the Bellagio. A teppanyaki chef killed his rival and chopped him up using his Shun knife. He was angry about getting caught but angrier that he had ruined his blade, cutting through his victim’s joints and bones. His reaction was both rational and irrational at once, like those of your fishermen._

_I am always torn between the rational and irrational, between what is in my best interest and what might be error but error with the possibility for_

—and here he has blotted out what appears to be a single word, under a thick, unreadable splotch of ink—

_what is human and induplicable._

_One of my many faults._

_It is human nature to be contradictory, I suppose. My most recent closed case was a homicide. A man shot his brother five times in the belly but claimed he never meant to kill him. The sincerity of his claim is, of course, debatable. Logic would say that the man, being possessed of his faculties, had to have known that he would seriously injure and most likely kill his brother, shooting him so many times at such close range with such a high-powered weapon. But when interviewed, the man was emotional. He said he only wanted to intimidate his brother and show him who was boss. I find myself thinking that it is possible that he may have both meant to kill his brother and not meant to, simultaneously—that he was at odds with himself, his logical and emotional aspects acting against each other._

_Because human consciousness is by its nature multifarious, we are able to oppose ourselves in ways that would be impossible for animals or other life forms to do. I’ve long wondered if this propensity is one we should either lament or celebrate. Strange as it may be for me to say, given the story I’ve just related, I’m beginning to think that it’s the latter._

_I had never thought so before._

_Forgive me my ramblings._

_I should tell you that the aforementioned homicide took place on Mt. Charleston. Have you been there recently? The scene was at a campsite, just below the tree line. Nick and I processed it in the early a.m., just as the sun was hitting the stream that had, no doubt, attracted the brothers to the spot to begin with. The reflection off the water was entrancing, despite the grisly nature of the crime requiring our attention by the banks. Another contradiction. Except for a few D.F. tussock moths, the officer assigned to monitor the scene, and the body, it was just Nick and I up there. Very serene. I wonder if you ever enjoy the scenery at your crime scenes or if in that particularly predilection I find myself alone? I thought you might have appreciated the view, but I could be mistaken._

_In any case, I hope this letter finds you well—returned from your vacation, rested, at ease in body and mind. Greg Sanders has already started asking when you’ll be back, never mind that, as of the writing of this letter, you’ve only been absent one shift so far. Though the lab certainly does not begrudge you your well-earned time off, it does miss you while you’re away and will be glad to have you returned._

_Until then._

_Grissom_

By the time Sara finishes the letter, she is no longer trembling. She’s—

She doesn’t know what.

Dizzy, she thinks.

She laughs and wipes her free hand over her mouth, stopping the sound, too loud and bright for her little apartment. Rocks where she sits, once, twice, holding her breath like the birthday girl with candles lighted on her cake. Though she has read everything on the page, she somehow wonders if there’s more.

There isn’t, of course. There’s nothing. No instructions. No explanation.

Just a six-page letter sent four years too late, courtesy of Gil Grissom.

Before Vegas, they used to send letters back and forth—snail mail, at Grissom’s insistence. Once or twice monthly. They wrote to each other about books, about cases, about life, she in chicken scratch and shorthand, he in a flowing script with a badinage almost Victorian. Her letters tended towards mishmash. She wrote them in stolen moments in the SFPD break room and during hours when she should have been asleep, sometimes taking several days or weeks to complete them. His letters seemed more cohesive, and she had no idea when or where he composed them. Only that they went on forever. Only that they were a distillation of everything charming, brilliant, and quintessentially _Grissom_ that had captivated her from the start.

For two and a half years, she and Grissom corresponded between San Francisco and Vegas. She sent him a letter in September and then transferred to the LVPD in October before he ever replied. The letter he never answered disappeared, forgotten, into their silence, just another casualty of her move, something else between them that evanesced after she settled in his city. With so many other, more glaring losses, this small loss hardly registered.

Not until today.

All his talk about Dostoevsky is in answer to thoughts she had shared with him four years ago, questions she had posed based on her then-recent summer reading. The case he references her working, the one with the body dredged up from the Bay, was one she had solved during some of her final months with the SFPD.

She laughs again, only this time her voice sounds strange and wrung. Her left hand clutches the letter, and her right hand covers her mouth, then slowly moves down to her chest, over her heart, checking the beat.

“What are you doing?” she says aloud, and she’s not sure whom she’s asking, Grissom or herself.

She knows that there are things she probably should feel in response to this letter, but she has always had trouble living by _should_.

Inside her is a muddle. Somewhere, incredulity, like she found something she thought she had lost forever in the most unexpected and obvious place. Somewhere, a stab of anger like a knife between her ribs. Somewhere, confusion near disorientation, as if someone had blindfolded her and spun her in circles, then asked her to walk a line. But also, everywhere, relief, like getting a first breath after minutes spent underwater.

The longer she sits with the letter, the more this last, most positive feeling encompasses her, overwhelming all the others. Her response is physical, involuntary: an awakening all through her, braids of gladness and admiration, affection and reckless loyalty, gathering into the one word she won’t allow herself to say. She thinks _I still_ —, but then immediately stops herself, knowing she shouldn’t.

Holding the letter in her hands, she feels as if she has gone back to that time, to those days in San Francisco when she would find an envelope waiting for her in the mailbox and practically run it back into the house, taking the stairs two at a time.

The letter seems to pick her up and drop her back in those days, in that frame of mind, in those feelings, in that memory, with such a perfect clarity and vividness that she feels completely transported.

She needs some time to think, she knows. So she rises. Makes her tea. Dresses for shift. Then she reads Grissom’s letter through again, for the sake of feeling, for a few moments, his presence.

She has no idea what he means by writing to her again after so many years, and experience warns her that she shouldn’t read too much into his actions or expect anything from him beyond the letter. But despite what she knows or thinks she knows, excitement builds inside her, and she can no more tamp it down than she can cover sunlight beneath her hands.

Phrases jump out at her from the page—

_People I care about._

_It misses you._

—and she smiles like a moron but doesn’t regret it.  

She spends her drive to the lab talking commonsense to herself: She’s not going to mention the letter until Grissom does. But she will send a reply—not right away, but soon. Maybe once her head stops spinning.

In the meanwhile, when she sees him, she’ll be casual, friendly. She won’t hold back in the way that she had been planning to, not when he has practically given her an invitation to make conversation with him again. She’s going to remember how to talk to him, the way he has remembered how to write to her. When she imagines how things might be different between them now, something close to giddiness wells inside her like soapsuds filling a sink.  

Getting to the lab, she forces herself not to look for Grissom immediately. She knows she needs to collect herself, to calm a bit, so she goes to the locker room. Warrick is there, already gearing up for a callout.

“Hey, stranger!” he says. “Long time, no see.” He shuts his locker and turns the padlock. Though his kit sits ready to go on the bench, he lingers for a moment, not in too much of a hurry to tease her some before he departs.

She rolls her eyes at him. “I was only gone four days.”

“Really? Feels like longer than that.”

She smirks. “You’re laying it on thick.”

“Maybe.” He then leans against the locker unit. “Hey, I’ve got what’s looking like a murder-suicide at the Excalibur tonight. Husband and wife from Primm in town for their anniversary. Twin GSWs to the heads, .45 in his hand. You wouldn’t want to tag along, would you?”

Her smirk becomes a real smile. “Ah, I see what this is about. Two person job, but Nick won’t go with you?”

“Well, he pulled a double out in Henderson yesterday and this morning, and you know how these out-of-towner cases can be pretty involved. Vega’s already telling me the hotel manager’s all over him ’cause—”

“—it’s coming up on the Fourth of July weekend. Angry tourists. Yeah, yeah, I got it.” She nods. “Lemme, uh—lemme grab a cup of coffee, and I’ll meet you out front in five. I wanna check in with Grissom, tell him I’m going.”

“Yeah.” She turns to her locker, but Warrick doesn’t immediately exit the room. He pauses in the open doorway. “Hey, Sara,” he says, his teasing tone replaced with sudden, quiet sincerity. “It’s good to see you smiling. Really.”

He melts away from the doorframe before she can respond.

For a moment, she remains motionless, shocked to stillness by his observation. They’ve never exactly been close friends, she and Warrick. They’re just coworkers, getting along better these last few years than they did the first. Briefly, she worries about what he might know. Maybe he heard something about her through the department grapevine. Maybe _smiling_ is his euphemism for _sober_.

But no.

It doesn’t follow. If someone had gossiped to him, he wouldn’t bring it up to her face. He wasn’t being accusatory or making a dig. His sentiment was genuine. He said what he said in kindness. Warrick has always been a good guy—Sara just hadn’t realized he paid any attention to her is all.

It’s the second time today that the depth of someone’s caring has surprised her.

She heads to the break room, wondering if maybe she is finally on an upswing. Waiting out the coffee machine, she considers what to say to Grissom, how to show him she is well, is ready to come back to work and talk to him again. She’s reaching for the pot when she hears someone enter the room behind her.

Him.

She can tell just by the sound of his movements. He has come as if he somehow knew where to find her—as if her thinking about him had been a summons.

They’ve known each other long enough that, once she turns to face him, she can tell right away that he is probably coming off a double or triple shift. He seems not have trimmed his beard in the last day or two, and there is a hard edge to his expression, as if he were a hawk seeing everything in vivid, microscopic detail.

Somehow his dishevelment only makes him seem silver fox and rugged. He’s always handsome, but he looks really good tonight, and it feels good to see him—feels the way his letter felt, like two hands fitting together—and she could swear to God, he shares the notion, seeing her. When she first glimpsed him, he was scowling, but as he registers her presence, his expression brightens into something just short of a smile, bleary and tired but decidedly pleased.

That’s all it takes for her to start falling down all over herself. She asks him if he’d like some coffee, but he is staring at her, and she can’t keep her voice from coming out high and flighty—can’t keep a blush from rising to her temples and prickling down her neck.

He seems to stare through her, conjuring up that same unstoppable heat across her skin as he did in front of the bloodstained sheets all those months ago. She’s saying something. He’s saying something. They’re awkwardly moving around each other like a badly choreographed ballet, and all her plans to be friendly and normal have seared away beneath the burn of his gaze.

She stammers, trying not to meet his eyes but then meeting them anyway, seeing him, and her resolve slips apart as easily as a single bow knot pulled at one end, from the aglet of a shoelace. She had told herself that this letter would be a new start for them, but everything feels too much like the old start—their original start, back in California.

Everything feels as intense and bright as that first meeting, when neither one of them could take their eyes off each other or stop talking, asking questions. She has to get away before she says or does something that goes beyond what is safe and what is smart.

“Can I get around you?” she asks, and he steps aside.

She’s almost to the hall when suddenly she remembers what she had meant to tell him before.

“I was—,” she blurts out, turning, “—was, uh, gonna go with Warrick tonight, if that’s okay with you. He’s got that case—the, uh, murder-suicide at the Excalibur. He said he could use a hand.”

She can’t bring herself to meet Grissom’s eyes as she speaks, but once she forces the last sentence out, she checks his reaction. She expects to maybe see caution in him, some concern that she is so discomfited, still unable to carry on a harmless conversation because she can’t calm down. It surprises her to realize that his reaction hasn’t changed—that he still looks stoked and schoolboy, vivified like he was when he first noticed her in the room.

“Sure,” he says, and there’s even a white light note in his voice.

She kicks herself all the way out to the parking lot.

“You okay?” Warrick asks her as she clambers into the truck beside him, slamming her door maybe a little too hard.

“Sure,” she says.

She spends the whole drive trying to convince herself that that one word is true.

She considers: She didn’t manage to strike up a friendly conversation with Grissom the way she wanted to, but she did manage to avoid saying anything completely embarrassing to him, and that counts for something. Sure, she stuttered. Sure, she acted squirrelly. She hadn’t expected seeing him to have such an effect on her is all. But now she knows, and she can be better prepared for their next encounter.

She will be better prepared for their next encounter.

His last electric look remains in her mind, captioned with phrases from his letter. He said that the lab would miss her, but he seems to have missed her himself, seems to have waited for her. She isn’t deluding herself this time around. There’s something different in his response to her, and she can feel it. She just has to be patient, and they’ll figure things out.

The Excalibur case quickly absorbs her. The investigation reveals a family business and a brother-in-law who stood to become sole owner with both his sister and her husband dead. There are some poor man’s Jimmy Hoffa shenanigans to sort through, recent pawnshop transactions to follow up on, and three new orphans, ages eighteen months to seven years, to pity.

The hotel management is insufferable. They twice start to send in the cleaning crew before Warrick and Sara have finished processing the room, and they are loath to have a police presence anywhere visible to their patrons, fearing all the badges will kill their family-friendly vibe. Brass has to strong-arm them a couple of times, but in the meanwhile Warrick and Sara still get the job done, collecting some key hairs from the suite carpeting and lifting a latent print from an open schnapps bottle they pull from the trash.

After working past the end of shift, they remain on premises into the afternoon and take their lunch sitting along one of the concrete ramparts overlooking the ground floor pools and verandas.

Warrick points with his sandwich to a costumed employee on the plaza below them. “Would you look at that poor joker?” he says. “It’s ninety-five degrees out, and he’s wearing a full suit of armor! Look at that! Those kids can’t even go in for a photo op hug without burning themselves on his plate mail.”

“Miserable,” Sara says.

Warrick nods, and Sara smirks, feeling good about where she sits and what she’s doing in a way she hasn’t in days. She watches the people below her, the tiny, milling parents and their children clad in swimsuits and flip-flops, their skin resplendent under the desert sun, slathered in zinc-based sunscreens, reflecting the glare in iridescent white. Their shouts are too far away for her to make out distinct words, but she hears the mass of them, the younger and older, men and women, play and planning, a symphony of human voices, untuned, untimed, unblended. They are all either oblivious to the homicide being investigated on the tenth floor or willfully ignoring what they know.

Somehow, the second option seems weirdly admirable to her: the choice to continue living despite violence, despite horror, despite death.

Warrick’s phone rings.

“Go for Brown.”

He and Sara sit within a few inches of each other, so she can’t help but hear his caller through the thin body of his phone—not perfectly but well enough recognize the voice.

Grissom.

“You’re still on?” Warrick asks him. “Have you slept at all this week?”

A self-satisfied smile curls at Sara’s lips. She was right that Grissom had come off some back-to-backs. She could tell just by looking.

Grissom responds to Warrick’s question, and Sara doesn’t catch the full sentence, but she does catch the tone. Warrick’s being jocular, and Grissom is not having it. He says something back, quick, terse. Maybe asking about logistics.

Warrick answers. “Um-hm. Yeah. The security guys are pulling elevator and casino cam footage, and I wanna check out the laundry facility before—”

Grissom cuts him off, asking a question, and Warrick immediately looks to Sara.

“Yeah, she’s here with me. You wanna talk to her?” Warrick says, starting to peel the phone away from his ear so she can have it. But then Grissom speaks again, and Warrick stops, mid-movement. “You su—?” Grissom is cutting him off, giving orders now. “Yeah, uh, okay. We’ll, uh, be back in a couple hours. I’ll keep you posted.” Warrick sounds much less jocular hanging up than he did answering the call.

He scowls, and Sara mimics him.

“What’s up?” she asks.

Warrick gathers the wrappings from his sandwich, crushing them into a tight ball between his hands. He shakes his head and stuffs his trash into its bag. “You know the only time Grissom ever micromanages? When he’s tired,” he says. He picks up his soda cup, taking one last static sip from the straw, then rises, turning back towards the hotel.

Sara frowns after him, unsure what she should make of Grissom’s call—and particularly of the fact that Grissom seemed not to want to talk to her. Warrick is right that Grissom gets a certain kind of way when he’s tired: hyper-focused to the point of myopia, withdrawn and sometimes short. Maybe he is just enveloped in a case right now, stressed about something, wanting to keep tabs on the team so he knows how to best juggle his resources. Sara can give him the benefit of the doubt, she thinks. Especially since he hasn’t been sleeping.

Once she and Warrick finish processing the hotel suite, they return to the lab to run their findings. She’s dropped the schnapps bottle with the print tech and is on her way to the morgue for the post. Halfway down the hall, she spots Grissom coming towards her.

Seeing him again brings up a flutter of nerves, but she swallows them down, determined to make this interaction a smooth one. Her smile is unfeigned and goes unchecked. They’ve walked to within a few steps of each other, and she expects them to stop and chat—at least enough for her to catch him up on her and Warrick’s progress.

But Grissom doesn’t share her wavelength.

“Hey,” she says.

He doesn’t respond to the greeting, just indicates the bindle in his hands. “Rush DNA,” he says, blowing by her without slowing at all. He doesn’t meet her eyes, and he certainly doesn’t return her smile, not even in a social, reflexive way. His expression is—she doesn’t know what to call it.

Murky, maybe.

—and he’s gone, around the corner before she can say anything more.

She knows, of course, that hot cases wait for no crim. She also knows that Grissom can sometimes be brusque without meaning to. More likely than not, he is caught up in his work and oblivious to how he’s coming off. She knows that.

But worry still nags at her.      

She and Warrick wrap their case in the early afternoon on Friday, and she heads to Grissom’s office to tell him that she is going home for a few hours before next shift. She and Warrick not only solved the homicide, but they also unearthed an embezzlement scheme that the IRS is all over. The brother-in-law was pocketing company money, something in the ballpark of $1.7 million. Grissom should be pleased with how neatly they’ve gotten everything sorted.

She knocks on the doorframe.  

He is sitting at his desk, poring over some kind of reference book, and he looks up at the sound. He passively accepts the knock and only flinches when he sees her face. She expected that maybe she would startle him, but she didn’t expect to see actual panic fill his eyes—not because of the intrusion but because she is the person intruding. He doesn’t greet her, just freezes, as if she had caught him doing something embarrassing.

“Hey,” she says, awkward now. She shrinks against the doorframe. “Did Warrick tell you? We finished up. Brass, uh, had the sheriff in Primm pick the guy up. Jacqui matched the prints. The IRS seized all the records from the business. I’m gonna just—I’m gonna go home.” She waits for him to say something, but he doesn’t. He stares at her over his reading glasses, his eyes wide and still unmistakably filled with fear. She fidgets. “G’night.” Nervousness forces a smile onto her face, one that she hopes he might mirror to her. But he doesn’t. He barely nods. Another beat, and she can’t stand his strange, scared silence anymore, so she’s gone.

The whole drive home, she wonders why he was looking at her that way—as if she were a tidal wave breaking over the foreshore, come to engulf his beachfront. She thinks _Jesus_ , but maybe she just caught him at a bad time. Maybe he wasn’t seeing her or was seeing her but in a different way than she thought he was. Still, the change between the Grissom in the letter and the Grissom at the lab is so marked. Worry and reason wrestle inside her, and a caution hisses at the back of her thoughts:

_Here is the part where he is a ghost story, and you always end up hurt._

But she’s still not allowed herself to think that one word, the thing she still feels but can’t acknowledge, not in a long time, not yet this go around, and she still doesn’t know but there might be a good explanation for Grissom acting so strangely today.

She hasn’t resolved anything in her mind when, a few hours after she falls into bed, she gets a call from Catherine: Convenience store arson up in Northtown. Bring galoshes.

The place smells of chemical and rot. A pipe burst in the storeroom due to the heat and sprayed industrial water over the char, slurrying the ashes into a thick, blackened soup. Everything is burnt waste, melted rubber, melted plastic, melted synthetic foods caked onto their shelves, still in the wrappings, tins and aluminums puddling near what appears to be the point of origin, where the fire burned hottest. Here, the smell of stringent benzene hovers in the air, evidence of a possible accelerant.

No one died in the blaze, but the property is unsalvageable, and once Catherine and Sara have concluded their investigation and the insurance agents marked the full damages, the owners will have to bulldoze the ruins. Maybe a year or two from now, another building will stand on this lot.

Catherine says this arson has a gang feel to it, and, knowing the neighborhood, Sara agrees.

They work for hours, rescuing items coated in firefighting surfactant and burn sludge from the stinking store shell, identifying a possible B&E spot where the arsonist or arsonists entered through a side door, and mapping out the path the fire seems to have taken. They collect possible fuel sources and photograph what appears to be graffiti along the cooler doors near the back of the site, smoked over during the blaze. Their galoshes stick to the floors, and when they blow their noses, the tissues fill with black.

Processing fire scenes is never a clean or easy job, especially after the fire department has hosed the place before CSI gets there. Catherine has just finished having the fire chief walk her through his department protocols when she gets a call. She steps away from Sara, who had been standing nearby her taking notes.

Sara doesn’t pay Catherine much attention at first, too busy writing down measurements to follow the conversation, but then she hears Catherine address her caller by name.

Grissom.

The call sounds upbeat, at least on Catherine’s end of things, and it goes on for a few minutes, not at all as short and curt as Grissom’s phone conversation with Warrick or as rushed as his encounter with Sara in the hallway. Catherine stands too far away for Sara to catch her every word, but Sara can still make out a bit.

“—might as well’ve opened the Hoover Dam—” A pause as Grissom replies something. “Yeah.” Another pause. Then Catherine laughs her full, brassy laugh, the one that means she genuinely finds something funny and isn’t just affecting mirth.

When she speaks again, she takes a few steps towards the front of the store, and Sara can’t hear her next words, just her tone, still positive, unchecked. She ends the call, the smile that accompanied her laughter not yet faded from her face. 

Once she is back at Sara’s side, she says something about how they should get a detective from the gang unit to help them ID the tags on the cooler cases, but Sara can’t focus on the suggestion. She’s still stuck on the phone call—on how Grissom seems neither too tired nor too busy to share a friendly conversation as long as that conversation doesn’t in any way involve her. The realization settles, leaden, in her belly. He isn’t just in a rush or overworked.

_He’s avoiding her._

Again.

The notion is confirmed to her once she and Catherine return to the lab. She enters Trace, bearing a sample for the GCMS, and Grissom is there, on the far side of the room, near the printer and the far door. The instant he and Sara see each other, they stop moving, as if police searchlights had just fallen on them as they broke from a prison yard. Panic blooms in Grissom’s eyes, but this time he is not alone in his reaction.

Sara panics, as well, not knowing what to say or do, feeling entirely unwelcome with him. Hodges is out, so it’s just the two of them alone in the dim room, with its chrome and plastic topography and strange shadows. There is no question they’ve seen each other, and they’ve stared at each other for long enough that now it will be strange if they don’t speak.

Silence.

Then.

“Did Catherine come back, too?” Grissom asks.

“Yeah,” Sara says.

Her single word dismisses him, and he’s gone, out the door behind him, as if his heels were on fire.

Something inside her seems to grate like metal on metal, and she grimaces, alone now in the dark. She has always hated to feel as if she has done wrong, but especially when she doesn’t know the nature of her error. Was it their exchange in the break room? Her voice? The look on her face? She knows she has a tendency to come on too strong. She has always wanted too much too fast. Her eagerness is probably to blame.

Of course, she has always known it is dangerous to latch her happiness to a single person. God, she should have been smarter than to think that everything would be different just because Grissom had sent her a letter. The bright feeling that had been in her chest collapses like a dying star, gathering into an enveloping black. She scrabbles to feel any other emotion than the one she does—fury, disappointment, resignation, anything—but she can’t. She doesn’t.

Inside her, there is a purpling bruise and the hard sense that, whatever she had expected, she has been rejected once again.

Working the rest of the arson case is a blur—just one perfunctory action performed after another. She sees Grissom once more before the shift is out, glimpsing him at the end of a hallway, rapt in conversation with Bobby Dawson. His hands are in his pockets, his posture is loose. He leans against the wall, asking questions, getting answers. He isn’t afraid of anyone now.

He doesn’t see her.

She and Catherine wrap their case around two in the morning, and even though she should probably stop for groceries on her way home, she doesn’t. She drives straight to her complex, takes the stairs to her apartment two at a time, and drops her kit as soon as she locks the front door behind her.

Though she should check her messages, drink something, eat something—just catch her breath—she doesn’t. Without preamble, without drawing the shutters over the living room window first, she begins to peel the clothes from her frame, dropping an article every few steps, leaving all her layers in a long trail behind her, as if she were a comet orbiting the sun.

She is naked by the time she crosses the threshold into the master bath. She sits on the edge of the tub as she runs the shower. Stream gathers in the room and fogs the mirror, curling in white rivulets, and she stares into the condensation and waits.

Only once she steps under the water, once she has suffused her skin, wetted her hair, and washed her palms over her face, one, two, three times, does she begin to cry. Not angry. Not righteous. Just hurt, as if she had been cleft down the center. She doesn’t sob, only gasps, and her shoulders rack, and she doesn’t know why she thought that things would be any different this go around—that anything would be any better than it has ever been before.

She remains under the stream until the pipes begin to moan, the hot water dwindling completely away until cold draws out rusty songs from the snaking copper in the walls. For a long time, she stands in one place, and, finally, when her shoulders shake not from tears but from the chill, she kills the water, gathers herself, and goes to her bed without first toweling.

After crying for so long, she doesn’t feel anything anymore—just stillness, like the hurt scabbed over. She lies wet across her mattress, her hair clinging in slick tendrils to her face and neck. She is too tired to probe her reactions any further, too tired to think more, to feel more, so she lies on her side and commands herself to breathe, and, for hours, that is all she does, until sleep finally takes her, just after the rising of the sun.

It seems like only minutes then before her phone is ringing, and the lab secretary is telling her through the blear of her waking that there is a 419 with her name on it waiting for her downtown.

The day and swing shifts are already tapped, so grave is up, and Brass wants her to meet him as soon as possible.

The secretary advises her to stop in at the lab to swap out her personal vehicle for a CSI truck before she heads to the scene. “Captain Brass said you’re gonna need a siren to get in,” she warns. Then, as an afterthought. “Happy Fourth of July!”

Sara had forgotten that today was Independence Day but now registers the thought with passive acceptance.

Holidays aren’t typically her bag, but she doesn’t so much mind this one. She seldom feels lonely watching fireworks, even when she is alone, and, though she has no other ties, at the very least, she is an American, which, on this date, is enough to count for something—is enough to make her part of a tribe.

Of course, the holiday means something different to her as a criminalist than it does to her as a citizen.

Las Vegas never passes up the opportunity to bathe its streets in colored lights and so over the years has become an Independence Day party hub. The population swells, with thousands of people pouring into the city. During the day, there are parades and bangers at clubs and pools, and, during the night, the Strat, Caesars, and other casinos illuminate the skyline all down the Strip with searing pyrotechnics. Television crews swarm the streets, and concerts play on every plaza. The crime rate inevitably soars, and solving crimes becomes more difficult as both pedestrian and vehicular traffic increases exponentially throughout the downtown.

Suddenly, Brass’s caution about needing a siren makes sense.

She peels herself from her bed. She is exhausted, and her belly and shoulders feel sore from crying. But she has always been able to do anything that she has to, anything that is required of her, so she readies herself for work, takes the back roads from her place to the lab, performs the recommended car swap, and reports to her assigned location—a particular mile marker on Tropicana Avenue, not far from Dean Martin Drive.

It is quarter past nine in the morning by the time she comes up on the scene, and the traffic is already horrendous. Highway Patrol has closed down three lanes on a half-mile long stretch surrounding the dumpsite. Horns sound in both directions, drivers expressing their displeasure at the blockade. Everyone has holiday parades to view and picnics to attend, and her crime scene is delaying them.

In order to break through the congestion, Sara has to flash the light bar and blare the hi-low. After she initially sets eyes on the crime scene from down the road, it takes her twenty-five minutes to snake through the gridlock and make it through to the barrier.

The first thing she says to Brass as she exits the truck is, “Jesus Christ.”

The first thing he says to her is, “God bless America, right?”

He has coffee for her, and as she takes her first sips, he gives her the rundown. The naked body of a man was found laid out along the meridian, bearing what appear to be stab wounds, in addition to some more superficial injuries perhaps sustained postmortem. One of the responding officers recognized the man as a local bum who lives beneath a nearby overpass. No one knows how the body got onto the meridian. Guy driving a big rig spotted it just before sunup and called it in.

It’s the kind of case that would normally invigorate her, a twist on the classic body dump, made interesting due to the location and logistical complications. Usually, she would be all over something like this—jazzed about it—and especially since she is working solo.

Not today.

Looking at the victim, she doesn’t feel anything, no sudden rush, no busy mind. She squints through her sunglasses and nods as Brass says that he has to head off to another scene.

“You gonna be okay here?” he asks.

He is leaving her with a detail of one half-dozen patrolmen, plus some guys from NDOT, in addition to David Phillips, who is at present crouched beside the body, taking a liver temp, so she certainly has no shortage of help, should she need it. With the three closed lanes, she has plenty of room to work in. Materially, she has everything she needs. She forces a smile.

“I’ll be fine,” she says.

Over the next several hours, she works smart. She works fast. She snaps overalls. She collects plastic and glass fragments from near the body. She discovers the remnants of a black garbage bag a few hundred yards down the highway and identifies blood and other biological material puddled inside.

The sun beats down on the asphalt until the tar starts to melt and gum beneath her feet.

She knows: She has reached the shutdown point, the break where her body and mind have disallowed her from feeling any more hurt or upset. Now she is numb and detached, which is what she needs to be in order to function. She is operating on muscle memory, barely present in her actions but highly effective nonetheless.

Brass checks in on her around lunchtime, and together they follow some leads. The officer who recognized the victim tracked down the guy the victim shares his lean-to with. The man is rank, and he bears bodily evidence of having recently engaged in an altercation. Brass takes him into custody, and Sara processes him for evidence—scraping under his nails, swabbing blood from his skin.

While they’re waiting on DNA, she heads out to the overpass and searches the lean-to. There, she finds three packs of cheapo fireworks and enough blood spatter to suggest that the victim probably died in the same place that he lived.

Further investigation around the site yields a bloodied box-cutter.

The big question becomes not who killed the victim or where or using what weapon, but how the killer transported the body to the meridian, which is located nearly two miles away from the primary crime scene.

By late afternoon, she returns to the lab bearing bags full of evidence for processing. She has heard from Brass that everyone on grave has their own case to work. Nick is in Texas at a family reunion, but every other team member is either out in the field or here at the lab.

She becomes cautious, rounding each corner.

Ever since her shower, she has felt numb inside, but she is familiar enough with grief to know that numbness is fragile like thin glass, and that hearing the wrong voice or seeing the wrong face will likely shatter her composure. She can already sense the suggestion of cracks, as if someone had applied rapid cold to her heated stillness, and the slightest disturbance will be enough to cause a break. She is nervous, cagey, and on the edge of sadness. Just being at the lab is enough to get to her. There isn’t enough work in the world.

She enters DNA at the same time Warrick exits.

“Hey,” he says. “You coming in from outside? It still hot as hell out there?”

He looks her right in the face, and she wonders if he can see that she is not well, that something has changed with her since they worked the Excalibur case together, just two days ago.  

For a split instant, she thinks that might be what she wants—for him to ask her if she is okay, to notice her, the way he did before. But then she realizes she wouldn’t know what to say to him if he did. She couldn’t explain what it is that has worn her down. It would take more than just invoking a name. It would take history on her tongue. Secrets she can’t speak aloud.

So though she hates herself for doing it, she forces a smile, and he doesn’t know her well enough to tell that it isn’t genuine. Her mouth feels like stale putty being pulled into a stretch, and the cracks inside her widen into full fissures.

“Yeah,” she says, “—and crowded everywhere. You don’t have to go on the Strip do you?”

Warrick groans. “I’m working some robberies at the Venetian.”

He takes something away with him as he goes—some cohesion in her, now suddenly gone. She always masks her hurt so that no one will notice when she is down. But then she always hopes that someone will see through the mask and understand what she is really about. Inevitably, when no one does, when she is too skilled an actress, too good a sport, she feels like hell, stupid and needy and helpless and mixed. She wants to be angry that no one knows her well enough to read her, but it is her own fault. She conceals. She is a mess of contradictions, a whirlwind inside, and she never allows anyone close enough to see.

She spends the rest of the day with a stabbing hurt lodged low in her ribs and feels close to tears. It isn’t just that she has been disappointed or experienced a rejection. It is the loneliness. It is the inescapability. It is the fact that she is broken, and she doesn’t know how to fix it. She needs help but can’t fit her mouth around the words to ask, and she tired, just so tired, even beyond sleep, down in her bones.

She limps along through the rest of her case. Tracks leads. Processes evidence. Puts every end together, until she forms a whole. This case is just another one in which someone died who didn’t have to. Just another arbitrary crime, another shame, and, though she wants to attach more meaning to it, she is sure that, one year from now, she won’t remember the victim’s face or any of the details. Inevitably, she'll forget.

As she puts her final notes to paper, her phone buzzes on the tabletop. Grissom has sent a mass text message to the team: He needs backup in the desert, whoever is free to come help him process a dismemberment, ASAP. She stares at her phone screen.

The universe is cruel.

Warrick wrapped his robbery case not long ago, stopped back at the lab for a few minutes, and then headed out to process a brawl at a biker bar. Seven or eight assaults. Some property damage. He’ll be gone all night. She has also heard from Brass that Catherine is at Lake Mead. Something about a speedboat collision. Nick is in fucking Texas, and she just wrote the last line on her report. Her homicide is closed.

Part of her wants to ignore the text—to pretend she still has work to do at the lab—but part of her knows that the situation is inevitable. She and Grissom are on the same team, and they have to work together. They can’t avoid each other forever.

She forces herself to go to him, the way she forces herself to do everything else.

The sun has already mostly set by the time she steps outside, the sky a canvas washed in grays and purples. There is no good route for getting out of the city from the lab with both the Strip and Industrial clogged with partygoers. The city throbs with music and traffic sounds, with sirens, bass, and the din of legion voices all gathered into a single rising cry. There are pops and bangs, private fireworks displays preceding the bigger casino shows. Flashes of color flare in the rearview mirror on the slow crawl to the I-15.

It is only once Sara reaches the freeway that she starts to break free from the crowds. Darkness gathers as she navigates from city to desert, following the coordinates from Grissom’s text. She considers that maybe she should call him to say that she is on her way, but then she thinks better of doing so. If she calls, they’ll both overthink things. They just need to see each other. Work the case. Nothing more and nothing less.

Soon hers is the lone vehicle on the road, and shadowy terrain stretches out around her, the desert tufted with greasewood shrubs and scrub, small clumps of blackness upon lesser blackness, visible against the expanse. Cliffs which by day are a ferruginous red loom colorless and mean against the night. Beyond them, there are stars, emerging as she escapes the thrall of light pollution haloing the city. Here, the heavens seem to thrive, if nothing else.

She snakes her truck up the dusty, alkali canyon, following a road which wends like a long and endless poem across the stark page of the landscape. She has begun to think that maybe she has gone on too long or missed the turn when finally she sees artificial light emanating from somewhere just up ahead of her, and she spots the coroner’s van and another CSI truck parked off the pavement on the hard bajada clay.

After a few seconds of off-roading, she is there, parking beside the other two vehicles. She draws a deep breath around the ache in her ribs and remains in the truck for just a few seconds more, gripping the steering wheel again after she has killed the engine.

“C’mon,” she tells herself.

David Phillips greets her as she exits the truck and warns her to watch her step, indicating the ground. She shines her flashlight on the turf and sees his reason: body parts, both whole and mutilated, litter the sand and sage, as if they had fallen from the sky. Here is a fingertip, there some kind of human offal. She cringes and peers out over the vast span, wondering how far the carnage stretches in all directions.

Grissom crouches low near the earth, several yards away from where she has parked. His back is to her, so she can’t see how he reacts to her arrival. Despite the cover of darkness, the desert still seethes with heat, and, as she approaches him, the temperature seems to increase. David Phillips is on his way out, so soon she and Grissom will be alone together. Maybe he hasn’t noticed her yet. She should announce herself. Say something.

“Sorry it took me so long to get here. The Strip is a mess. Not to say that this isn’t.”

Grissom doesn’t respond right away. He looks up at her as she arrives beside him, but he doesn’t rise. “What happened with the dead bum?”

Whatever fear he felt during their last few encounters at the lab seems dissipated now. There isn’t panic in his eyes or skittishness in his movements. He remains low, though she towers above him, and he appears strangely comfortable with them arranged that way, as if she were the moon, and he the sea quietly swaying below, rapt in her gravity. She doesn’t know why he seems so relaxed around her now when before he couldn’t flee her fast enough. She never knows why with him. Never understands his reasons.

After so many years, there is still so much of him that to her remains a mystery.

She hadn’t intended to speak much during this outing, but now that she finds him staring at her, words gather in her mouth and spill from her lips before she can stop them. She rambles out the details and outcome of her case, speaks to fill the darkness, speaks because he is staring at her, and she doesn’t know if his staring makes her want to laugh or want to cry. When she runs out of story to tell, she reaches for a question—asks him what he wants her to process—because maybe if she starts moving, he’ll stop looking at her that way.

His gaze remains soft. “Whatever you prefer, my dear,” he says, the last two words a lilt, gentle, intimate, like something that should be said with the sunrise, somewhere in secret, somewhere safe.

There is a split second in which the endearment seems natural, both to him and to her, like something that just makes sense, given their history. But then they both realize that he has committed a breach and broken not just a rule but an understanding. She stills and ceases temporarily to breathe. She feels as if she were the string of an instrument that had suddenly been plucked.

The note rings out over the nighttime desert.

It’s not the first time that he’s done this. There have been other compliments, small sweetnesses in San Francisco, then, sometimes, occasionally, over the last few years in Vegas. After the explosion at the lab, everything was in chaos, and she was mostly insensible, but one of the few things she recalls is that he knelt before her in the parking lot, took her hand in his, and called her _Honey_ , as if he had done it a thousand times before.

It was that particular affection which had finally induced her to ask him to dinner—which had convinced her that they were sharing the same charge along a single electric current.

Now she doesn’t know what to think, doesn’t know how to find the air. He seems not to know, either. He gapes at her, afraid again, and seems to shrink down ever lower to the earth. Suddenly, he is the one who is vulnerable and naked. He is the idiot. He is the one burning to the ground. It isn’t due to anything she has said or anything she has done. Just his own words. Just his own instinct, acted on it before he could repress it.

She thinks back to the Marlin case, to how he practically chased her away from that house, to how he couldn’t look at her, to what he told the surgeon during those last few minutes of the interview, the confession that she overheard, and finally she understands why he has been so strange with her this week.

Nothing she has done or hasn’t done has mattered. Only what he feels. Has felt.

This last year, she has tried so hard to convince herself that she has been alone in her attachment, that she has read too much into his actions and overestimated his care. But some part of her has always known that it’s not that he feels differently than she does but that he feels too much the same. The letter suggested as much, but these two words certainly prove it. Not just the simple fact of them, but the inflection, the quality in his voice that she could never fully explain to anyone who hadn’t heard it for themselves, who hadn’t heard it as she has.

 _That’s love_ , she thinks, breaking her own taboo. But then, in the next thought, _He’s scared to death._

The realization crests in her as if it were a wave, then washes into an intolerable sadness, because what does it matter? What does it change? If he is afraid, then he is afraid, and there is nothing enough in her to make him brave.

She can hardly look at him now and takes a few steps off. “I’ll mark,” she says quietly.

“Okay,” he says, sounding stunned.

Silence spreads out over the desert, blanketing the long alluvial washes which fan out from the rock foothills across the basin, bedding down with the cacti, sleeping, dreamy, over the sand. Whenever Grissom and Sara have had nothing else, they have always clung to their work, and they do the same now. There is nothing either one of them can safely say, no gestures they can make, so they rise and gather their materials, stake out their grid, and begin working, at first adhering mechanically to a rhythm, then syncing to it more naturally, becoming enveloped in their tasks.

She marks each finding with a cue and wonders why she isn’t enough—why what he feels—what she feels—what they feel—isn’t sufficient to change anything between them for the better. If it really is that word that neither one of them will say, then shouldn’t they move mountains for it? She is a realist and a scientist, and maybe that is why she knows something rare when she sees it. Maybe that is why she knows that for them, as strange and individual as they both are, this will be the only match that could ever possibly make sense.

There is never going to be another day like that first day at the conference. Neither one of them will ever stick to anyone else so hard and fast again.

How foolish that they’re both standing out here, cowering in the dark, holding back from each other, when they’ve known from those first minutes that what they’ve got is one-in-a-million, something exceptional.

Shouldn’t he be able to fight his fear for her? Shouldn’t she be able to fix herself for him? The feeling was so easy to fall into, but, out here among the dunes, it seems like the most difficult thing in the world to continue with.

Seeing him in her peripheral vision, his figure cut in silhouette, where he lingers a few paces behind her through the dark, she feels as if she might rip clean down the center. This is it for them, isn’t it? This is how they’re always going to be. She’ll never go anywhere, never leave. She’ll stay miserable in his city forever. And he’ll never give her anything that she can hold onto, anything tangible or real. They’ll go on wanting forever and never experience satisfaction, and, in the end, their separateness will have nothing to do with rules and department policies, just with human failure, just with their own shortcomings, with him being scared and her being irreparably broken.

She feels the same way now as if she had just taken a hard fall down the stairs, like her insides are rattling, like she is unstable, like she hurts in odd places and isn’t sure if she’ll be all right. Tears gather in her eyes, blurring out the desert terrain, and, to avoid them, she looks away, past Grissom, back towards the valley.

By now the casino fireworks have begun, flaring, syncopated, above the city skyline. She watches them and aches inside, for the first time as lonely on Independence Day as she is on other holidays. Gradually, she becomes aware that Grissom is watching her, staring again, the way he does. His interest causes her caution to fall away.

“Wow,” she says, not daring to meet his eyes, still looking out over the lights. “I think we have a better view than anyone on Vegas Boulevard.”

“Yeah,” he agrees. He pauses from his work, as well, and waits with her, quirking his head as a burst of red and white cascades over the Strat. After a few moments, he speaks again. “How has it been, getting away from the lab?”

It’s strange, but somehow it seems easy for them to speak now—easy now that she knows the reason for his fears. She feels, in a way, that she has nothing to lose by speaking, that she could say anything and never cost herself in the end, that with nothing to gain, she is suddenly free.

“I dunno,” she says. She is honest. “I mean, I haven’t been going anywhere, except LA that one time. I’ve been here, in town, just trying to, uh—just trying to get some stuff figured out. I went to one of those sessions with the, uh—with the counselor—the PEAP, and—” There is nothing more to report. The session didn’t fix anything, and there probably is no fix to be had.

Grissom is still curious. “How is it,” he asks, “—staying home, I mean?”

Staying home has been hell, but she doesn’t know how to quantify the experience, not without telling him more than he probably wants to hear. She thinks back on herself, scrubbing blood from her couch cushions, ransacking her closet, reading his letter over and over again. The images strike her as absurd, and she laughs. “I think I’m going stir-crazy,” she says, which is a good approximation of the situation, at least.

Maybe he knows she is talking about the letter, about how it made her feel outside herself, though she is still trapped. She stands and looks away from the fireworks, too lonely to watch them anymore, despite Grissom’s company.

“Why not go somewhere?” he asks, and they’re not discussing her vacations anymore.

They’re talking big picture now, being frank about how he asked her to move, and nothing has gone to plan since that day. They’re talking what she knows about him and what she knows about them—that even given how they feel, nothing between them is likely to change. That they’re both trapped by fears, by an inability to change. That maybe the best thing would be for her to leave, to just skip town, the way she always has when things have gotten too hard before.

The problem is that, this time around, she doesn’t know where she would go. She has no ties anywhere, nothing waiting for her. It is not as if there is happiness somewhere on the horizon for her, if only she relocates. The whole world seems to her just as blank and desolate as this desert, and if her heart is breaking right now, it won’t stop breaking just because she sets out to find a new place.

He thinks that she could go somewhere.

“Like where?” she asks, and she truly wants to know.

She doesn’t know what she expects him to tell her. What he does tell her is earnest, simple. “I’d go someplace that reminds me there are bigger things out there than me. The ocean. An old-growth forest. The mountains.” He steps toward her and stops by her side. It is the closest they’ve been to each other since the truck ride, which now feels eons past and miles away.

“Someplace where you’ve got room to grow.”

“Exactly.”

Of course Grissom would disappear into the uninhabited wild. It’s an answer that makes sense to him. He fears togetherness more than he does loneliness, and maybe that’s the problem. Sara is scared to death she’ll end up alone. He’s scared to death that he’ll end up with someone.

“You don’t like cities,” she observes. “Too many people.”

He shrugs. “You should take another vacation. Really go somewhere this time. You’ve still got what? Seven and a half weeks?”

He acts as if any amount of vacation would be sufficient for her to change how she feels, to get over this feeling. She has never known how to allow time to heal her, never known if that’s even possible. Over twenty years have passed since what happened at the B&B, and she still hasn’t found closure. She wonders how many years she’ll carry this wound around with her, too.

Instead of asking him the question, what she says is, “Yeah. Maybe I could take a road trip.”

“A road trip might be nice."

That’s as much as he can offer her—time and space. Since she won’t leave and he won’t make her leave, it is the solution they are left with. They’ll have to make do.

The fireworks over the city have for the most part petered out. There is smoke in the sky and nothing moving in the desert except for herself and Grissom. She turns her flashlight back on and looks to him under the illumination. She won’t allow herself to break her rule again, though she feels the word, sad and strong, still cleaving through her chest.

In a way, she feels as if she and Grissom are saying goodbye to each other now, even though what is really happening is that they’re agreeing to see each other every day, to never fully part.

“Thank you,” she says, because at least they have been honest.

“You’re welcome,” he tells her.

Then he is turning away, photographing another marker with a bright flash against the darkness. They talk about the case throughout the rest of the night, and the talking feels comfortable, like they are finally on the same level. They’re both smart. They’re both tired. They’re both just saying as much as needs saying.

The deep bruise Sara has felt inside herself is still there, changing its colors from purple to yellow to dull, hurt brown. She knows she’ll have to live with it now, that she’ll carry it with her like the invisible hole in her side. Some days will be worse, and some days will be passable, and, either way, she’ll carry on, because she is always fine, even when she is not.

Eventually, Warrick and David Phillips turn up at the scene to help her and Grissom with the last of the processing and cleanup. By four in the morning, they have everything tagged, photographed, and loaded for transport. She ends up riding back to the lab with Grissom, who tells her that he’ll drive so she can sleep. She drifts off while they’re still in the canyon, looking over the valley, the grid of endless neon lights rolled out between mountain ranges as if it were a quilt with conductive patches. She wakes to Grissom, his hand clasping her elbow.

“We’re here,” he says, and he is whispering, as if he were reluctant to disturb her sleep. It takes her a second to realize that he is already standing outside the truck—that he has the gear bags from the trunk slung over his shoulder and both their kits waiting behind him on the blacktop. He has already shut down the engine and gathered their things. He has spared her a few more minutes of rest, giving her as long as possible. It is not yet dawn, but the night has begun to become more gray than black. There is no one else in the parking lot, just them.

For a moment, she registers only the gentleness of his touch and the thought behind his gesture, but then she remembers and winces. The tear inside her rips further and farther apart.

“I’ll get that swab to Trace,” she says, rising and yawning into the palm of her hand.

Grissom retracts his touch but doesn’t move from his spot. “Go home,” he tells her, not unkindly. “Get some rest. Come back when you’re fresh.”

“I’m fine—”

“Just go home.”

Normally, she would fight him, but tonight she is too tired to fight—too tired in every way. She pauses. Nods.

“Are you okay to drive?” he asks, and she has no doubt that if she said no, he would drop everything to take her home.

For her, this is the worst part: They both know now exactly where they stand, and they both feel sorry about it but still can’t change, so all they have is kindness. In a way, it would be easier if they could be angry at each other. But since it’s both of them—since they’re both to blame for the unbearable situation that they’re in—their only recourse is to show each other compassion. He knows that he is hurting her, and she knows that she is disappointing him, but neither one of them can do anything better. They can only try gentleness. They can only try somehow to soften the blows.

In the next few days, they talk more than they have since the truck, mostly about cases, but also sometimes more freely. On Tuesday, the whole team is working a construction accident along the interstate, and she finds him in the layout room, looking over specs. He tells her that the Ancient Greeks developed the mechanical crane in the sixth century BC. She tells him about a project she remembers from her undergrad, studying mass displacement variation and static equilibrium in construction equipment.

“Did you like working the applied physics, or were you more interested in the theoretical?” he asks.

His question extends beyond the purview of their case. It is personal, and he doesn’t try to hide it.

She shrugs. “I like both,” she says. “The math.”

He smiles at her, pleased to know something about her that he didn’t know before. The bruise on her heart throbs, but beneath it, there is also some underlying sweet. She wonders then, if she were given the chance, if she would choose to forego moments like this one—if she would prefer never to be reminded of what he feels for her, if it were in her power to decide. The truth is that she doesn't know. Being close to him without having him has always hurt, but, at the same time, she has always been too afraid to cut herself off from him completely. It's hard to remember now what her life was like in San Francisco, how things were before they met, but somehow she thinks she wouldn't want to be that girl again, that she would rather have something than nothing. It's probably just another flaw in her code.

She puts in a request for more vacation on Wednesday, this time setting the papers in Grissom’s hand herself. This request is for two weeks off, back to back, the longest of her vacations so far, the longest vacation she has ever taken from any job she has ever held. She feels self-conscious, watching him read the form, knowing that he probably has it in his head that she intends to flee. Maybe she does, but she is also just trying to breathe again.

“I’m, uh, gonna drive to Zion’s,” she says. “Take a few days, hang out down there.” She looks him in the eye and forces herself to smile. The first rule of goal-making is to write down your intentions or tell them to someone else, creating some accountability. That is what she trying to do.

He can’t hide the worry in his voice. “By yourself?”

“I’ll stay on the trails,” she promises. “No worries.”

But before she leaves Vegas on her road trip, there is something she has to do. On her first day away from the lab, she returns to Spring Valley, to the New Age complex. She has another appointment, and though she had considered skipping out, she knows she should go.

“What do you want to talk about?” the shrink asks her, and _want_ is still a strong word, but the hurt in her heart is also strong, and so is her sense that the only way to escape from this gyre is to find something to hold onto, something solid and real. For twenty years, she has been stuck in the same patterns, becoming the people who hurt her before she could defend herself at all. She wants to change, and she will do anything to get better, no matter how it smarts.

She shifts where she sits. “I want—,” she says. Then, switching suddenly. “—I have trouble letting go.”

She can do anything she has to do to survive, no matter how unpleasant.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So my "outside the internet" life is pretty busy right now, and I apologize for the delayed updates. Thank you for your patience. I promise to keep 'em coming, if not a bit slowly.
> 
> Also, actual rock star Sarah at graveshiftparty on tumblr and graveparty here on AO3 made a playlist for this story, and I'm super excited about it. Check it out at her [8tracks](http://8tracks.com/graveshiftparty/something-in-you-i-believe-in), and be sure to send her some love for her great work. She included the title track for this fic and everything, which is pretty rad. Makes for killer reading music, so you should definitely give it a listen.


	7. Chapter 7

**VII.**

He counts the times he has seen her truly happy.

Early on, the walks down Marshall Beach, through its fog and brambling beach weeds. She dangled her shoes from her fingertips by the laces and went barefoot, rolling her jeans to the ankle. White soapsud waves lapped after her, and he would follow her footprints until the waves erased them from the dark sand. On one fortuitous occasion, they found the place unoccupied, and she stood on the serpentinite stones at the shore. The wind caught her hair, and he saw her deepest dimples when he said he wanted a picture.

Then, the reunions at conferences after months spent apart. Small moments when he managed to compliment her to a blush. The hotel room in Reno, he hopes, he believes. Her smile against his smile through the darkness. That first night in her new Vegas apartment, when her furniture was still en route, traveling in a moving truck somewhere along I-5. They ordered pizza and ate on the floor. He said _Home sweet home_ , and she smiled so brightly for him, as if he had somehow flipped the breaker to all her hidden lights.

Later on, more rarely. Maybe sometimes when her cases work out the way she wants them to. Maybe for seconds at a time, after a good joke lands or when she allows herself to be praised.

But none of his memories are definitive. He doesn’t know if he has ever been acquainted with her at a time when she wasn’t also nursing some secret hurt. He can’t think of a moment during the last three years when he can be sure she has been happy without also being sad. Even in San Francisco, sometimes, he would catch her looking faraway and bereft, like a sailor who had lost something out at sea. She could shake the sorrow more easily then, be back to herself in an instant, after a quip or a kiss. Now it seems to have worn in so that it underlies everything, even her smiles. It lives where she lives, and she can’t seem to get away.

Most law enforcement officials have strong opinions about whether or not people tend to get what they deserve. Personally, Grissom has always avoided the question. As a criminalist, it isn’t his job to mete out sentencing. He only provides evidence and leaves it to the courts to decide what should be done. He doesn’t know if he believes that evil necessarily meets with evil and good meets with good or if, when you strip away all the mystical elements, karma holds as a scientifically valid concept, an extension of the First Law of Thermodynamics, a recycling of human energies.

What he does know is that he would swear before any jury or judge, by his life if he had to, that Sara Sidle deserves happiness.

His counting and recounting of her small, glad moments has proven to him that she needs more than she has gotten so far—that she has been deprived of what should have been hers.

Sara is a truly good person, someone who wants to do right, who doesn’t just avoid perpetrating harm but who actively tries to better the world. She’s kindhearted and ethical, compassionate especially with children, the downtrodden, and animals. She thinks about people, about how she deals with them and how her actions come across, and, even though she often makes mistakes, she consistently tries to better herself, probably more than anyone realizes.

Grissom knows these things about her by observation, but he also knows them in a more absolute, gut-deep way. Though they’ve always skirted certain details of her biography, they’ve talked about other things deeply and for hours, beliefs and lines in the sand, the essence of their work. Because they so often find themselves sifting through the messy vicissitudes of life and death, they’ve almost had no choice but to discuss their motivations and existential thoughts. So that part of Sara he knows well, in an almost tangible way: her deep, quiet commitment to doing right, even in a world that is commonly wrong.

He knows better than to call her an optimist, but he also knows that she has hope. He admires her in so many ways, but especially in the sense that she doesn’t give up working on herself. Sometimes he has witnessed her frustrated and lashing out in anger, saying words she didn’t mean but couldn’t take back, tripped up by her impulses, making poor decisions, even casting herself as the bad guy because she just can’t help but argue. But just as often, he has seen her trying. He has seen her setting her pride down to do her job, apologizing, being careful, and showing surprising gentleness, even to those who are perhaps undeserving.

Even to him when he has been cruel.

He remembers standing outside an apartment building, raging like a tempest, his heartrate racing at nearly one-hundred beats per minute. But she was calm, and she was soft. She whispered to him on the edge of dark and streetlights and smiled even though he couldn’t. Her thumb brushed over his cheek, and she looked into his eyes like there wasn’t a cloud in them, and she could see for miles—maybe forever.

She is good, he thinks, and that should count for something.

She is good, he knows, and he is not.

Sara deserves happiness, and some selfish thing inside him yearns to be the cause. He remembers the thousand sensations of her body beneath him in that dark hotel room, her throaty laughter and her natural, unchecked hums of satisfaction at his touch. He longs to feel those sensations again and to help her feel them—wants, in a way he can’t fully explain, to be responsible for laying goodness on her altar and pleasing her all the way to her bones.

But, of course, it’s the wrong impulse.

No doubt, it is.

Better that she finds what she needs elsewhere, when he would only disappoint her eventually. He is, after all, a dark and craven thing, unworthy of her light. She should be happy for herself and not dependent on anyone else, even him.

That’s what she deserves.

That’s what he keeps searching for and holding his breath to see: happiness returning to her like color to the sky after a long night. He isn’t sure what her happiness will wear like, but he wants to believe he’ll recognize it instantly—that he’ll know that she is happy once she is happy, as simply and easily as he knows her name.

They’re talking more often nowadays, and they’re not so awkward around each other. At first, they have little conversations here and there, exchanges of case notes and trivia. Working the dismemberment case, Grissom feels like, maybe, he is getting a read on her, like she has settled into something, some kind of resignation. But then she throws him for a loop: Not long after they wrap the case, she comes to him saying that she needs more time away, another two weeks. She says she’s got plans to go to Zion.

Had any other member of his team told him they wanted to visit a national park, Grissom would think nothing much about it, but with Sara, his response is immediate, a nagging feeling. He imagines her out in the desert, looking as heartbroken as she did on the Fourth of July, only this time with no fire in the sky to astound her and no one to talk to—not even him, poor company that he is.

He voices his worries about her going by herself, and she says, apologetically, “I’ll stay on the trails.”

She offers him a careful smile, as if the look were a dusty heirloom she were taking down from the high shelf, and she didn’t want it to shatter. The unspoken implication is that _alone_ is all she has, not a choice, just default.

“If I see tarantulas, I’ll take pictures for you,” she promises.

The reckless thing in Grissom wants to say right then that he’ll go with her—that she doesn’t have to be alone, if she doesn’t want to; that he could be there for her, if she needed. His imagination speed paints an image of them talking, really talking, beneath red rock formations and open rust-hued sky. But the image is impossible, and the impulse foolish.

As soon as his better judgment kicks in, he crushes his fancy, reaching instead to say something that is helpful, possible, clever, and clean. The impulse and wanting are so strong that he can barely push them down. _“Theraphosidae aphonopelma,”_ is all he can manage—that and a guilty smile.

Maybe that just means that he is a coward all over again.

So she goes, and, in her absence, his thoughts roll like unceasing waves, work their only interruption. He takes as many shifts as he can, burning through his overtime at a rate which, in the past, would have induced Cavallo to chew him out, but now, in this time of transition, earns him nothing except looks, half-impressed and half-concerned, from the lab staff.

Ten days into Sara’s trip, he receives a postcard in the mail: on the front, Angels Landing; on the back, a single assurance expressed with telegraphic brevity.

 _Here safe._  
_—Sara._

The postcard arrives to his home address, and it’s nothing, just Sara humoring him really, and yet he becomes attached. He traces his index finger over the sandstone incisor rising jagged from the orange mouth of the desert. He keeps the postcard with his papers and takes it with him to the lab, tucked into a folder. During off moments, he slides it out. Reads and rereads her signature.

When she returns to Vegas five days later, he doesn’t mention the postcard to her, and she doesn’t mention it to him. He ceases carrying it with him to work, no longer in need of the simulacrum with the actuality in his presence. He pulls Sara in on the home invasion case he is working with Warrick, partially out of necessity—they could use the extra hands—and partially for the other, selfish reason. He tries otherwise to keep himself in check but struggles not to slip.

During her time away, the desert of Sara’s sojourns seems to have become part of her. Her hair has lightened, sandied, and sunburn patches pink her shoulders and cheeks like red yucca flower or rose quartz. When he gives her her assignment, he stands close to her and feels heat radiating from her skin, as if she had carried it with her all the way from Utah.  

When Warrick goes out with Brass to process their suspect’s home, he and Sara end up alone together at the lab, and he has to consciously remind himself not to encroach upon her space. They’re looking over some evidence recovered from the primary scene, and she says, suddenly, sans prompting, “I didn’t see any tarantulas. Lots of crickets, though.”

She adjusts the knob on the microscope she’s using and momentarily hides her eyes against the lenses. He hovers just at her shoulder. He wants to ask her how it was—the park, the sights, her time away—but she spares him the trouble.

“All it takes is a hundred and sixty miles, and the desert looks so different. There’s snow on the mountains there, tons of green along the river, red sandstone everywhere. Same heat, though.” A pause as she looks up from the microscope. “It was nice being out there.” Then. “I never used to like the desert, but now it’s—”

Her sentence trails away, but Grissom can fill in the blank well enough. Even unsaid, the word is a revelation, an echo to the one he said months ago in the truck. She watches him form the connection, and, when he meets her eyes, he sees fear there, frenetic as a shorting wire.

He expects her to backpedal or retreat—because that’s what he would do, were the situation reversed. But she has always been braver than he. She bites back her fear and holds her ground. There’s no shrugging and no looking away. No quick joke to diminish the big implication. She doesn’t smile, just allows Grissom to really see her, to fix her in his gaze. She leans artlessly against the countertop, her posture making no excuses, not proud or defiant but resigned.

Her look says, _Well, what can you do?_

—a genuine question, but one that Grissom doesn’t know the answer to.

Normally, here, he would change the subject. He would start talking case details or administrivia. Maybe exit the room in a rush. But now guilt snatches at him like a lure, catching under his breastbone and tugging. She has said something honest to him, and he has to say something honest back to her.

Since his own words seem paltry, he reaches for a quote.

_“‘I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert sand dune, sees nothing, hears nothing. Yet through the silence something throbs and gleams...’”_

He waits for her to parse out what he has told her now and place the reference. Of everyone at the lab, she is always the one to catch the most of his quotes and to do so the most quickly. Her look turns severe, not angry but intense with thinking, as if she were at a crime scene, considering a clue for which she had only minimal context. For a moment, she scrutinizes him, staring in the way surveyors stare at landscapes or astronomers the stars.

Then she says, _“J’ai toujours aimé le désert. On s’assoit sur une dune de sable—”_ The severity of her look breaks like a cloud finally opening to rain, and she laughs. “I can’t remember the rest,” she says, “—and my translation skills are not good, not, uh—” She shakes her head, suddenly self-conscious. “I’ve never read it in English.”

Grissom hasn’t heard her speak French before. The words sound unpracticed on her tongue but also lovely, clean and polished, like crystal, in her good accent. Her mouth forms pretty shapes on the vowels, and her smile now is pretty, too. He imagines, maybe, kissing her.

In San Francisco, he would have.

But now he stops the thought. “I’ve never read it in French,” he says instead. Then. “I’m glad you enjoyed your trip.” He forces himself to look her directly in the eyes.

“Thanks,” she says, suddenly seeming nervous again, “—for, uh, letting me do this. Take so much time off, I mean.” She fidgets with the lip on the counter and looks to the floor, escaping his gaze.

Grissom shrugs. “It’s your vacation. You’re entitled to it.” He smirks and ventures a joke with her, hoping to put her at ease. “Technically, you also have sick days, you know.”

She still doesn’t look at him but smiles a bit. “Ten weeks of them, right?”

He ventures another joke. “I’d have to check your personnel file.” More serious now. “Take as much time as you need.”

The admonition is not an easy one for him to make, but it is right—a single small, right thing among so many things which are wrong—and it earns him back her eye contact. She nods and seems grateful, relieved even, and he knows it is the only thing he can do, just giving her time, just giving her space. He keeps reaching towards his better nature, and maybe someday it will amount to something. Maybe someday it will be enough.

Their conversations over the next few days concern only their work. As they solve their home invasion case, Grissom observes Sara carefully, paying close attention to her actions and demeanor. He makes no determinations as to whether she seems better or worse than before. Maybe she is only the same. He continues to hold his breath for her, to wait on her happiness the way the desert waits on rain.

She tells him, during the second week of August, that she is going to Big Sur.

“The tickets were cheap,” she says, shrugging to downplay the significance of her decision, even though they both know it can’t be one she has made on a whim.

They’re in the break room, eating lunch, and Nick is there with them. Grissom takes his time formulating an appropriate response, and Nick speaks while he is still thinking.

“What’s there to do? Look at the ocean?”

Nick takes a big bite from his burrito and stares at Sara challengingly. It’s not just that, as a Dallas boy, he doesn’t understand the appeal of the seashore. Like everyone else around the lab, he wants to know why she keeps taking time off from work, though he is too smart to ask directly.

Sara shrugs again and fiddles with a celery stick. Her answer is a dodge. “There’s good driving.”

“You have a thing about driving—” Nick shakes his head.

Grissom cuts in. “Have you ever driven over the Bixby Creek Bridge?”

Her look says no.

“You’d like it. You can see right out over the ocean—waves for miles, all the way to the horizon. The view is beautiful.” He had meant to say _exquisite_ , but the other word slips out instead. He feels compelled to fold it in among other, more neutral words. “Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton filmed in that area,” he says quickly. “Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth bought a cabin. There’s a restaurant now. Nepenthe.”

Sara raises an eyebrow. “You’ve been there?”

“Just once.”

Sara’s quizzical look shifts into one more contemplative. She is putting together puzzle pieces in her mind, figuring him out. He can’t say what conclusion she derives from this evidence, but he holds steady, allowing her to search his eyes, to see him and make out what she will.

Nick laughs and claps Grissom on the back. “Their travel bureau should hire you, man—except you need to update your sales pitch. Those movie stars are a hundred years old.”

“I like old movies,” Sara says, shrugging. “They’re classics.”

Her statement is apropos of nothing, but Grissom seizes onto it still, tucking it away, like the postcard, to return to in future moments. He has never taken her to the movies, not even in San Francisco, but for a moment he can’t help but want to, and he allows himself the illusion that maybe she might want him to, as well.

So Sara goes to Big Sur, and Grissom doesn’t know if she’ll drive the Bixby Creek Bridge or eat at Nepenthe or see any sights or not. He isn’t sure what exactly she’s looking for in her travels, what she is running from or running to. He only knows that he misses her as soon as she is away.

He buries himself in consecutive shifts and management.

Greg wants to log hours to certify for CSI Level I, but he is still officially the acting DNA night tech, so Grissom works out a compromise, allowing him to join in on early call-outs as long as he heads back to the lab by eleven o’clock to start his regular tech shift.

Having Greg in the field during off-hours serves a dual purpose: on the one hand, Greg for the most part gets what he wants, and that stops him from whining; on the other hand, Grissom gets just a bit of what he needs—which, in this case, is another worker, someone to sub for Sara.

Her absences have been hard-felt, and not just by him personally. Honestly, he doesn’t know how the team ever got by before her addition. There is just too much work for four criminalists to handle in a single shift, and even having Greg sub-in only helps somewhat.

It’s not just that they need another CSI or even just another CSI Level III. It’s that they need _her_ —Sara, who is often the first person to show up for shift and the last person to leave; Sara, who inspires friendly competition in the ranks; Sara, who is their unofficial cryptographer and mathematician; Sara, who has always read the latest _JFS_ ; Sara, who has the department handbook handily memorized and can recite protocol on cue.

For the first four nights that she is away, Grissom works five cases, most of them small-scale, but all of them involved, and everyone else keeps as busy as he does. Then things really pick up. The team gets a call in the early evening about three bodies found on a Strip lot, each vic shot in the head, execution-style. Swing has been working a small aircraft crash in the desert all week, so that means grave is up, all hands on deck.

“Sara sure picked a hell of a week to skip town,” Nick mutters as everyone clears out from the locker room. He gives her empty locker a rap with his knuckles as he walks by, and Grissom winces at the clashing sound. He tries not to think too much about what he is missing, just about what is necessary. His success is questionable.

He is headed down to the morgue when Jim Brass stops him in the hall.

“I have bad news, and I have bad news,” Jim says. He flashes Grissom an acerbic look—something along the lines of _You’re gonna love this_. “We just matched the prints on these vics. Turns out, this is a drug-running case, and the DEA has jurisdiction.”

DEA jurisdiction is indeed bad news. Most local law enforcement officials have their own reasons for disdaining the feds; Grissom’s is that he can’t abide how inefficient they are. To a one, federal agencies tend to rush tasks that should be completed meticulously and slow down tasks that should be completed quickly or even altogether skipped. They also lack subtly. Everything is a spectacle for them.  

Grissom cringes. “What’s the rest of it?”

Jim gives a grim chuckle. “Conrad Ecklie applied for the AD position, and he’s made it past the first round of interviews.” Grissom doesn’t manage to fully suppress his disdain at this revelation, and Jim smirks. “Listen, Gil, I don’t think it’d be too late for you to apply for the spot—”

“I’m not an administrator.”

“So delegate.”

“I don’t want Cavallo’s job.”

“If you don’t take it, Ecklie will.”

Jim is talking in absolutes now, as if the selection process were perhaps farther along than it is. Grissom can’t deny that the prospect of working for Conrad Ecklie rankles him, but he isn’t as convinced as Jim is that Ecklie’s hiring is a done deal.

“They could always hire an applicant from outside the department,” he offers.

Jim shakes his head. “They won’t, though. Cavallo is heading up the hiring committee himself. He’s looking to make a quick choice and get outta here. He doesn’t want to have to vet strangers or train in someone new. He’s gonna take the path of least resistance.”

“What about the rest of the committee?”

“There’s the Director, then everybody else works for the Sheriff’s Office and the mayor. Nobody from the department. To them, Ecklie looks real good on paper.”

Tension throbs in Grissom’s skull, the beginnings of a headache. The picture Jim paints is a bleak one, but he doesn’t know that he can do anything about it. He isn’t about to apply for a job he doesn’t want just so he can maybe block Ecklie from having it. Either the committee will select Ecklie or they won’t, and really it isn’t up to him to decide. He has to believe that good judgment will prevail and that, even if it doesn’t, nothing much will change in terms of his day-to-day job. Ecklie isn’t exactly as lazy as Cavallo, but he does like to take credit for work he didn’t do, and, as is, the lab infrastructure readily allows for that type of bottom-feeding. There’s no need to dismantle the setup.

Jim’s other bad news—about the DEA—proves more directly affecting.

Working with the feds aggravates Grissom much as he anticipated it would. The lead agent isn’t only interested in solving the three homicides. He wants to bring down the entire drug ring, and he expects Grissom’s team to somehow produce evidence from thin air in order to allow him to do so.

While he doesn’t go as far as to push them to falsify records, he does send them off hunting snipes, digging through ancient police records, and accompanying his people on dead-end errands. When he overhears Warrick make an ill-timed quip about Waco, he hauls off on Grissom for not keeping his people in line. The ensuing argument feels like one that Grissom has been dragged into before—like the same argument he has any time a higher-up imposes on his team and their system.

That’s the feeling that stays with Grissom all week: not déjà vu, per se, but the sense that his life has become incredibly predictable. He can’t count all the times he has worked cases like this one with feds like these ones and weathered these same disagreements about discipline, personnel, and divisions of labor.  

But the feeling has to do with more than just his work.

His birthday is coming up in just a few days, and, while he is normally indifferent to the date or even sometimes oblivious to it, this year, he can’t help but fixate. He goes home to his condo and repeats the same routine, over and over again, ad infinitum. He has the same breakfast cereal, the same route walking the dog, the same downtime activities—the journals to read, the baseball games to halfheartedly watch, and the long hours spent lying in bed, trying to sleep during the brightness of the day. His life in 2004 isn’t much different from his life in 1994. Everything with him has remained the same for decades, and what does he have to show for it?

Usually, he takes comfort in the sameness. He likes order. He likes patterns. He likes knowing what to expect. But today, this week, this month, he feels a lowdown disconcertment, a sense that, contrary to his nature, he might actually like for something to surprise him.

He can’t stop thinking about Sara, and the empty monotony of his life does nothing to help his problem. He knows her whereabouts this time around, but that doesn’t keep him from missing her or prevent him from wanting her in a way that he shouldn’t.

She asked him to share a life with her, and he turned her down—he was too afraid—and now who does he have to blame but himself?

The more he sits with this realization, the more simple activities start to get to him: eating meals alone at his table, watching movies by himself, lying solitary on his mattress, which suddenly feels far too vast, like its own desert continent. He goes grocery shopping and glimpses a young couple price-checking jam on Aisle #5, and his heart climbs, sharp-clawed, into his throat. He never used to mind being alone, and, even now, it is not that he wants for much company.

Just hers.  

Just her.

Ennui settles with him through the week as if it were low-hanging clouds over a mountain range. His mother has finally pinned him down for a video chat for the first time since he gave up his trip to Los Angeles back in June, and he wonders if she’ll be able to see the disaffection on him the second their connection goes live.

These video chat dates are a new development in their relationship. Previously, they used TTY and email as their primary media for communication.

In theory, this new technology should allow them to converse with more frequency and ease than they have in the past and improve the quality of their conversation by allowing them to sign, even long-distance.

Reality is, unavoidably, more complicated.

They still only manage to fit in digital face-to-faces like this one once every few months, and, even then, their conversations suffer from lag, which prevents them from speech-reading and sometimes swallows their signs. They still have to rely heavily on email in order to keep up with each other, and their correspondence remains sporadic at best.

The infrequency of their communication is, of course, his fault, not hers. He is her only child, and they are each other’s only living family, and if she had her druthers, they’d probably video chat much more often than they do, perhaps every week or even daily. She allows him to use his workload as an excuse for putting her off, but they both know that he could contact her more regularly, never mind his hours.

Her love for him is, as biology prefers, unconditional, so she forgives him his aloofness and seldom complains about how little she sees of him. Most of the time, he allows himself to believe that she is comfortable with their patterns, but today he sees, as her webcam focuses, that she has dressed up for their chat and even, seemingly, visited the salon to have her hair curled.

She wears the ladybug brooch he bought her years ago as a Mother’s Day gift, and, with her artist’s eye for light, has arranged for this conversation to take place in her sunny kitchen, her laptop aimed toward the window over her shoulder, peering into the yard.

It isn’t lost on him that she has greatly anticipated what to him has seemed, until this moment, just another appointment.

It also isn’t lost on him that everyone he loves, he disappoints.

His mother is a small woman and has retained her sharpness, even as she has aged. Most people who meet her find her severe, and he understands why, though around him, she softens, turning more careful than harsh.

As the video chat lurches into connectivity, she first signs to him that she is glad they could find time to catch up with each other. Her gestures flow easily and, to anyone else, they would seem casual, but he sees they are rehearsed. She’s trying to make it seem that it is only an accident of scheduling that they haven’t conversed since spring and not anybody’s fault, but her magnanimity is a lie. He tries to transform his wince into a smile. Mom, yes. Me same.

His mother asks him about his work, and he tells her there is nothing new. She asks him how his friend is, and, though his mind ventures elsewhere, she means Catherine. He tells her that Catherine is well, very well. Her little girl? Also well. She doesn’t ask him about anyone else because she doesn’t know anyone else to ask about.

Part of him wants his mother to halt the conversation and wonder if he is all right—to see, somehow, that he is restless, even through the blur of the screen and over so many miles and after so many months. He wants her to see for herself because he cannot tell her his trouble unsolicited. He knows she wouldn’t judge him, of course. But he still can’t bring himself to sign the words, to give shape to his unease.

Instead, he sits in silence as she recounts how the city post office is shutting down its local branch and describes to him her progress with this summer’s garden. She is animate and demonstrative, a cascade of signs on signs. Their chat lasts maybe a half-hour, and she talks while he mostly watches and nods, occasionally chiming in to ask about their mutual acquaintances and what’s happening at the gallery. He tries to be dutiful, attentive, and kind, hoping to maybe make up for his scarcity, but he also realizes that there is no real substitute for time and that, if he were a good son, he wouldn’t have anything to make up for.

It is all he can do that when she tells him that she loves him, he returns the sign—the only love he has ever been able to easily express. She reminds him that he should expect a birthday package in the mail, and he promises her he’ll remember to get it. Mom, thank you. True, sure. Goodbyes with blown kisses, one last second of lag, and they end the call.

For a long time after he closes the connection, he sits on the couch and considers the advice he couldn’t bring himself to solicit. After all these years, he has never learned how to open when he needs to open. The problem is that he is no good with people. Ask his mother. Ask Catherine. He can solve just about any equation and adhere to scientific methods and protocols as if they were his second nature. But if he has to deviate from the empirical, to do what is messy and human, he can’t.

Most of the time, his inability to interface is obnoxious, but sometimes it’s caustic. Sometimes he hurts those who try to get close to him because he has such rigid boundaries that he can’t bend, even when they need him to. He has often felt that other people possess some component that he missed out on, some reaching out for a collective that he’s never had or been able to imitate. It’s a flaw, finding solitude so safe. It’s a flaw that even when he wants someone, he is too cowardly to say so, much less to take action.

Even hours after he has ended the chat with his mother, he cannot find sleep. He reads Anaïs Nin and uses Sara’s postcard as a bookmark. He has begun to think again about the box in the hall closet, not just the letters but the photographs—the one photo in particular, the shot from Marshall Beach.

Sara is set to return to work on Tuesday—his birthday—and while Grissom feels his usual, Pavlovian excitement at the prospect of her first shift back, he also feels timorousness. With all the time she has taken off this summer, he can’t tell if she is better or worse than she was when he first took that call from PD.

He wants so much for her to be happy, never mind if he can ever be happy himself.

The DEA makes the two shifts preceding Sara’s homecoming miserable.

Sunday night, they confiscate a few hundred pounds of drugs and paraphernalia from a warehouse distribution center. While they celebrate their victory—one of the biggest successful busts in Nevada state history—Grissom’s team processes and logs the contraband down to the last item and gram.

The job is laborious and necessitates that Grissom pull Greg out of DNA for backup. Unfortunately, even with the extra pair of hands, the cataloguing still spills into the next shift, meaning that Grissom must coordinate with Ecklie.

Ecklie soon develops a rapport with the lead DEA agent and self-servingly volunteers himself to talk to the press about the case outcome once everything is wrapped. The headache that for days has been threatening to strike Grissom finally bursts like a storm cloud in his skull, not his yearly migraine but still intense enough that Catherine has to slip him ibuprofen from her purse to get him through their double.  

Monday night isn’t any better.

The call goes out on an unrelated homicide in Northtown, and Grissom sends Nick to cover it, a decision with which the lead DEA agent takes issue, considering they still have evidence to process and one more suspect to apprehend. Another loud hallway discussion ensues. Afterwards, Catherine tells Grissom that he kicked DEA ass, and Warrick thanks him for having everyone’s backs. Grissom says he was just doing his job, which is true.

He still feels as if he has taken these same actions a thousand times before, even down to when Jim Brass invites him into his office for brandies after work. Jim says the DEA guy is a piece of work, and Grissom nurses his drink and mulls the undeviating patterns in his life.

When he finally arrives home after shift, he finds his mother’s promised package sitting outside his door. After having been so involved in the case, it only now registers with him that today is his birthday.

He is forty-eight years old.

Inside his condo, he unpacks the box: a few neckties to his mother’s taste, not his, labeled with a sticky note _For court_ ; a monogrammed copper pen set; and flowers from her garden, bottled in mineral oil. Her card is homemade on thick, pulpy paper that he knows she pressed herself. On the cover, she has painted, in watercolor, a landscape, the mountains surrounding the marina. _Gilbert, happy birthday. Son, I love you. I am proud. Always, Mom_ , she has written on the inside flap. The same guilt he felt during the video chat returns to him in a rush.

He performs again his same routine, his same lonelinesses, and tries for a time to sleep. Despite his guilt and frustration, all he wants is to see Sara tonight and to know that she is happy. If he could make her smile—really smile, not in the sad way—then he could still count today as a success, never mind his other failures. It would be the best present he could give himself and the best present he could give her. He keeps the thought with him all the way to the lab.

When he goes to the locker room at the start of shift, she is there alone, arranging her things inside her locker.

“Hey,” he says.

“Hey.”

Neither one of them is smiling yet, but he already feels bettered just by standing in her presence. She’s still dressed dark today but not in black. Deep blue. She finishes with whatever she was arranging in her locker but doesn’t close the door.

“Greg said you guys have had suits in here all week.”

“Yeah, the DEA.”

“I bet that’s been fun.”

“It’s, uh, ongoing.”

Sara offers him a sympathetic nod. She knows he doesn’t like working with the feds. If he wanted to, he could drag her in on the case and make the going more enjoyable for himself, but he decides against it. From a logistical perspective, she would be better utilized on Nick’s Northtown case. From an emotional perspective, it’s probably best if he limits their contact, for his sake as well as hers.

He stashes his keys in his locker and shuts the door.

“How did Big Sur agree with you?”

She brightens. “Oh, uh, well. Yeah, I liked it. The views, they’re—I mean, like you said—fantastic, and the driving’s great all the way up the coast. The only thing was the whole place was so crowded.”

Grissom commiserates. “August in a tourist area.”

“Yeah. I couldn’t get a hotel, so I, uh, ended up just passing through.”

“Where did you go?”

“San Francisco.”

She looks shy now, like maybe she shouldn’t have told him her destination, even though he asked. Her reticence would seem inexplicable to anyone who were eavesdropping on this conversation, but Grissom understands. They’re coming close now to talking about old times, old things. It feels as if they’ve just walked into a room that had been locked for years, where slipcovers phantom the furniture, and dust motes varnish each surface.

He almost doesn’t know how to talk to her about San Francisco without saying something too forward. To him, the Bay City is inescapably tied to her, the backdrop to a thousand of her portraits curated in his mind. Did she go to any of—the pronoun slips in— _their_ places, all those avenues crisscrossing Union Square that they spent their first nights strolling, her old neighborhood in the Mission District, the restaurants and bookstores she tugged him into, Marshall Beach, even the crime lab down Bryant Street where she called him once as her consultant?

He wonders if she thought of him at all while she was there, if he haunts the city for her as she does him. Of course, she lived in San Francisco before they ever met, and he never lived there, only visited, so she undoubtedly has important memories of the place that have nothing to do with him, though he cannot say the same of her.

Still.

She might have remembered. She might have thought of them, maybe, for a moment.

“How was it?” he asks, his voice coming out quieter than he had meant it to.

“It was—it was—nice. Strange, kind of. I hadn’t really been back since I moved.” She skirts his gaze, pretending to look at him, though she isn’t really. Her hand remains on her open locker door, as if she were scared to let go of it. “I went to the Asian Art Museum.”

It’s a place they once idly discussed visiting together but never did, as other things occupied their time. Now they pause, and she finally looks up at him. They each wait just a second too long for the other person to say more. When neither one of them can carry the topic—he can’t muster a following question, she won’t elaborate sans a prompt—he doubles back to something easier.

“So you just drove straight through Big Sur?”

“No, I stopped. Actually—”

Now she reaches in her locker, producing something from the top shelf. She moves like do-or-die, like she has to be fast or she’ll lose her nerve, pushing the something into his hands: an item, rectangular, wrapped in newspaper and Scotch tape.

His heartrate increases, and he feels a swoop in his belly, as if he has just ridden over the crest on the first hill of a roller coaster.

“I hope this is—hope it’s—,” she stammers. “It’s just we always, um—” She loses her words just as he realizes what she has given him.

His birthday gift.

They’ve exchanged gifts for as long as they’ve known each other: birthdays and Christmases, every year since 1998. Admittedly, the tradition has become increasingly awkward ever since Sara moved to Las Vegas, but they’ve both still stubbornly honored it, even when she was with her medic, back before the lab explosion, and last year, though they were hardly speaking.

Grissom hadn’t given the possibility for this year’s exchanges much conscious thought, but he realizes now that somehow he had implicitly expected that he would not receive anything from her.

“Of course,” he says quickly. The dash of his heartbeat has turned more now to bird’s wings, like flight in his chest. He holds the gift in his hands and stares at Sara, remembering everything she has ever given him, considering everything he has ever wanted to give her. “Should I open it now, or—?” He shifts the gift in his hands, uncertain.

“Sure,” Sara says, too fast. “I mean, if you want to.”

He carefully slits the tape along the edges of the newspaper—the _San Francisco Chronicle_ ; the crossword page—and unfastens the corners on the wrapping. The size, shape, and weight of the gift are a dead giveaway that it is a book, a fact confirmed as he feels the softened stitch of an old cloth cover. At first, he holds the book upside-down, but then he turns it over to see the title and author’s name printed in gilt-block.

_Lectures and Notes on Shakespeare and Other British Poets by Samuel Taylor Coleridge._

A first edition.

Grissom looks from the book to Sara.

She speaks as soon as his eyes are on her, as if she were a student who had been called on in class to give an answer. “It’s the first complete collection of his essays.” She brushes a lock of hair behind her ear. “It’s just that you were reading _Hamlet_ a while back, and I know you like Coleridge, so I thought maybe—I mean, it’s not his poetry, but—well, I stopped at this bookstore in Big Sur, and it seemed pretty good, so, uh—” She stops herself with a shrug. “Happy birthday.” She offers the same fragile-glass smile she did a month ago, when she told him she was going by herself to Zion.

Now Grissom’s heart seems to halt midflight. If someone were to ask him, only one word could describe his reaction to Sara and her gift: _taken_.

He is taken by surprise.

His thoughts are taken over.

His heart feels as if she has taken it, warm in hand, and held it there.

He has to draw a breath before he can speak. “Thank you,” he says, reverent. Then, immediately, another thought. “It’s lovely.”

Sara gives a short, voiceless laugh, as if she were the one surprised now. She smiles not like glass but bashfully and pushes her hair behind her ear again. “I’m glad you like it.” Then. “You haven’t already read it, have you?”

Quickly. “No, no. It’s—”

He stops himself from saying _perfect_ , but they can both still hear the word echo across the dusty space of their imagined secret room. For a moment, they meet eyes, and some buried sinew in his chest gives a sharp twist. In forty-eight years, nothing has ever surprised him as much as Sara Sidle, and the surprising thing about her is neither the words she has said nor the gift she has given him, but just that she exists, and she is real, and she is standing here with him.

They hold each other’s gazes only long enough to draw breath, and then the moment seems to burst like a bubble.

Warrick appears in the doorway to the locker room. “DEA guy wants us in the garage.”

Sara smirks. “Ongoing fun times. You want me to—?”

“No need to ruin your first day back. You go with Nick.”

“Thanks.”

Sara’s are not the only birthday wishes he receives during the shift. Ever since the Millander case a few years ago, he hasn’t been able to keep the day to himself the way he used to. Catherine slides him a card which she has signed along with Nick and Warrick, and a couple of the lab techs extend him their well-wishes. Someone has left cupcakes in the break room which, though not explicitly labeled for a celebration in his honor, are certainly not coincidental and come with a note written in Judy the secretary’s handwriting: _Take one_.

Between all the greetings and the DEA case, he doesn’t get in any more private moments with Sara during his shift, though they do see each other briefly, passing in the hallway, and she smiles warmly at him before ducking into Trace. Come morning, he carries her warmth home with him, where he finally opens the book for the first time and discovers two papers folded over on each other, tucked between the cover and the title page.

Separating them from each other, he finds Sara’s handwriting.

_Happy birthday._

_I hope this present finds you well and that the lab has treated you kindly while I’ve been gone. I’m thinking I’ll be back just in time to join in when Catherine and Co. make a fuss over your big day—something between “no acknowledgement” and “party in the break room” with cake._

_Aren’t birthdays always kind of surreal? To me, they’re just this arbitrary marker. You’re supposed to feel older, more accomplished, but I never do. My internal monologue doesn’t really age, or at least it doesn’t become wiser. Sometimes I think I’m doing things the same way I’ve always done them, the same way I did at 12 or 17 or 25, which seems sort of increasingly ridiculous as more years go by. Is it the same with you? I’m probably crazy._

_I’m writing to you from the hood of my rental, stopped at a scenic overlook on HW 1. I didn’t think to get a card at the bookstore, so you’ll have to excuse the loose-leaf. There are 100+ terns over the ocean, which is very blue close to the coast but turns darker like slate about a mile out._

_Scenery has me thinking re. your letter. I don’t always remember to appreciate nature on callouts, but sometimes. There was that case we had last year with the missing hikers at Red Rock, when we got there just at sunrise—me, you, Cath, and N. We had to climb that bluff to survey the terrain, and I just remember looking out over the valley and admiring the view. There was a thin blister of white sun spilling over the lip of the horizon, the rest of the sky on fire. Beautiful. That’s something that makes sense to me, even when other things don’t._

_Anyway, I’m rambling now, and I should probably get back on the road before rush hour hits. I’m trying to come up with what a real birthday card would say here—maybe a wish for your happiness and health in the upcoming year, which certainly applies._

_More specifically, I hope this next year will be everything you need it to be, whatever that means for you. I don’t think I’ve ever said this to you before—maybe written it on an eval.—but you’re a good boss. I don’t think I could do this job if you weren’t. Thank you for giving me so much time._

_Many happy returns._

_—Sara_

Grissom sees Sara in his mind’s eye, perched atop the hood of the car, sitting cross-legged with her notebook in her lap, staring down the sunlight reflecting off the water. His imagination raises up an ache in him, like a flag flying on a pole, but at the center of the ache is a sweetness, unfailingly fond.

Sara is so good, he thinks, and he is not. She is generous in a way that he can’t seem to be. She gives to him so readily, her thoughts, her well-wishes, even her praise, and what has he ever given her in return?

He wants to be able to thank her again, to call her right this very moment—no, to turn his head and see her with him, sitting beside him on the couch. He will be with her again tomorrow, he knows, and maybe for a long while now, considering that she has no more vacations pending. But even the promise of having her with him regularly at the lab doesn’t seem enough. He measures his time by her absence and presence, and there are so many things he wants to say to her and so many things he wants to hear her say. He misses her voice, misses the way she moves, wants to experience the surprise of seeing her, a miracle in the uncaring universe, and having her close enough to touch.

His mind returns again and again to that drive down to the valley after they worked their Fourth of July case. Watching her sleep completely astonished him. If he could have her with him like that always and watch her sleeping every day, this stagnation he feels would entirely dislodge. Disintegrate. He has had forty-eight years of sameness, and he wants the difference that she brings more than he has ever wanted anything—wants the simple, priceless surprise of just coexisting with her.

He reaches for his phone and, for the briefest second, considers calling. He cannot bring himself to act before, as if on cue, the phone rings. He answers without checking the caller ID.

“Grissom, this is Conrad. Yeah, I’m here with the DEA, and we’re just going over some paperwork. Am I seeing this right—that you had Lab Tech Sanders sorting the cocaine they confiscated?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then, we’ve got a problem. There’s a two gram discrepancy between the DEA log and your team’s, and the evidence has Sanders’s initials all over it. I guess I don’t have to tell you how it looks that your non-criminalist flubbed a weigh-in. We’re gonna need you and Sanders back here now.”

Grissom grits his teeth. “Greg is a trainee, and he was being supervised. I wasn’t aware it was your job to oversee my team’s work, Conrad.”

Ecklie scoffs. “I’m, uh, just doing a favor for Robert. He figured since I was involved with the bust I could—”

Grissom cuts him off. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

The next two days are an administrative nightmare.

Greg swears up and down that he followed procedure down the letter, but the weights still don’t match up. Grissom defends Greg to the extent that he is able, but the DEA agent is furious that a trainee was allowed in on a career case, and, with Cavallo’s blessing, Ecklie is ready to throw both Grissom and Greg under the proverbial bus. The more the matter is investigated, the more and more it seems that Greg did indeed botch procedure somehow—though no one can determine the exact nature of his mistake.

Grissom is certain that though the numbers are off, every gram of cocaine is accounted for, but he is having a hell of a time proving his hypothesis. He keeps being pulled into and out of informal meetings with the DEA and Cavallo, and, in the meantime, the backlog on nightshift cases is piling up. Everyone else on his team has moved on to new assignments, and he’s out of the pool himself until he can file his official report on the bust.

He is hiding under the low lights in the evidence locker, poring over reports, and starting into his third consecutive shift, when he hears a sound at the door and looks up to see Sara entering the room. She keeps her hands burrowed in the pockets of her lab coat and wears a careful expression, seeming reluctant to disturb him.

It’s the first time they’ve occupied the same space since his birthday.

“Hey,” she says gently. “Nick and I wrapped our case. How’s the DEA mess?” She surveys his papers strewn over the table.

He grimaces. “If I can’t account for those two missing grams, they’re going to come after me for the customary pound of flesh.”

“That bad, huh?” She winces, sympathetic. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

Ecklie has already invited the lab’s quality control officer, a member of his own dayshift team, to perform a full top-to-bottom overview on the case, so really there is nothing for Sara to do. As much as Grissom would like her company, her time and energy would be better spent elsewhere.

“No, thank you,” he says, grateful for her offer but unable to accept.

He expects her to go now that he has declined her help—the nightshift ended hours ago, and she should sleep before she has to come in again—but she lingers for a moment, watching him. He is always keenly aware of whatever attention she pays him, so he knows that this attention is different from what is usual, not some sideways glance or quick glimpse but a long, deep look, as if he were a puzzle she intended to solve.

Though there is nothing hard or mean in her expression, he can’t help but feel naked fear with her staring at him. What could she possibly see but an old man who has dug himself into a hole that he doesn’t know how to get out of? He is sure he looks ragged and gray, as restless outside as he is in. He isn’t typically vain, but he does thrive on her admiration, and the thought that she might perceive his weakness, looking at him so closely, causes him to brace.

Please don’t let her disdain him, and please don’t let her show pity.

Finally, she speaks. “You should get some coffee.” When he doesn’t immediately reply, she starts from the room but then pauses at the door. With a guilty smile, she switches on the lights. Then. “Don’t stay too late.” She’s gone.

It takes Grissom another four hours before he finally is able to explain the results from Greg’s suspect weigh-in. It seems that Greg left the twist-tie on the bag when he put it on the scale, while the DEA agents removed it. Grissom doesn’t think that Greg’s action constitutes a mistake, but Cavallo disagrees—or is at last willing to pretend he disagrees in order to appease the US government. He issues Grissom a thorough reprimand and tells him in no uncertain terms that he doesn’t want any CSI ranked lower than Level III working federal cases in the future. The whole proceedings are public, in every way a spectacle.

By the time Grissom makes it home, he feels as if he has spent all day being pummeled by bricks. Not only is his body tired from pulling the triple, but his mind is tired from the inane arguments. He knows he should go to sleep, but somehow he is unable to, despite his exhaustion. Instead, he takes Sara’s book with him to the couch and reads to forget both the harshnesses of his day and the samenesses of his life.

He isn’t embarrassed to return to the lab for next shift because he doesn’t feel that either he or Greg did anything contrary to lab protocol, no matter what Cavallo might say otherwise.

However, he does still feel caught in his rut.

Though maybe he shouldn’t, he seizes the opportunity to take Sara as his partner, now that they’ve both closed their previous cases. They’ve gotten a call to Spring Valley. A high school party got out of control, and a sixteen year old drove his pickup truck into the house where the party was taking place. He’s injured, his passenger is dead, and four other kids are in the hospital, one listed in critical condition. The house itself is a mess, and everyone is wondering whether this was a drug and alcohol-fueled accident, a deliberate act of violence, or something else.

Sara has a CSI truck idling outside the lab, waiting and ready to go. When he opens the passenger door, she switches off the radio, killing whatever song she was listening to.

“Vartann just texted an update: the kid in critical condition is now listed at ‘death eminent.’”

Grissom grimaces. “The guys from the city say the house’s been cleared as safe to enter.”

“Well, that’s one good thing, at least.”

By now he’s buckled into his seat, and Sara is driving them out of the lab lot. The night is overcast, and the clouds above the city capture its neon lights, holding the glow in muddled pastel between the Strip skyline and the gloom. The whole downtown has the appearance of a cocktail drink melting over ice in a glass, its colors diluting and bleeding away.

For a few minutes, Grissom and Sara remain silent as she finds the right roads and steers towards the highway. Then.

“Greg thinks you’re mad at him,” she says matter-of-factly.

This information surprises Grissom. He hasn’t spoken to Greg since before his final meeting with Cavallo yesterday. To his recollection, their last interaction wasn’t in any way tense or heated. He only told Greg about the twist-tie and said that he still had his meeting with Cavallo pending. He specifically remembers saying that, as far as he was concerned, the matter was settled, and Greg should go back to his lab.

“Mad at him?”

Sara shrugs but keeps her eyes on the road. “He thinks you’ve been avoiding him.”

“Oh.”

More silence as Sara puts them on 95 South. Then, as they pass under a streetlight.

“Well, are you mad at him?”

“No.”

Sara smirks and shakes her head, amused at Greg and Grissom’s obvious miscommunication. “He thinks you’re never gonna let him do fieldwork again.”

Grissom is less surprised now.

While he thought that the case was settled once he discovered the source of the weight discrepancy, Greg obviously expected some kind of debriefing following his meeting with Cavallo. He considered his actions a method of streamlining, but Greg read them as angry silence. The mistake is familiar, one that Grissom has made before in other situations and probably is likely to make again, considering his faults.

He can never seem to recognize potential social mistakes as he is going along. He can only identify them in retrospect—and sometimes only if they’re pointed out to him by someone else.

Sara must have realized the nature of this miscommunication from the start, which is why she broached the subject in the first place. Grissom gives her a long look, and though she still keeps her eyes on the road, she seems to feel his attention and bites back another guilty smile. Grissom should maybe thank her for her help, but he doesn’t know how to without acknowledging how intimately she knows him—how she reads and directs him better than anyone he has ever met.

Instead, he observes, “You and Greg talk a lot.”

She downplays with a joke that isn’t exactly a joke. “I listen to him while he talks a lot.”

“You’re a good listener,” Grissom says. “You’re able to intuit things, more than just what’s being said. I, uh, struggle with that. How are you—how do you pick up on those things? Understand people in that way?”

Now Sara glances at him in the rearview mirror. She looks skeptical. “I don’t think I do. I’m not one of those people who can just—I dunno— _level_. Not like Catherine or Warrick. I constantly misread people. But you—I mean, I think you’re better at it than you think you are.” Her words are flighty, hopping like a bird between the high, wobbling boughs in an unsteady tree. She draws a quick breath. “You’re honestly one of the best listeners I know.”

They’re getting close to their scene now, and the police scanner in the truck crackles out coordinates for them and the other police and rescue vehicles approaching. Grissom expects the interruption to end his and Sara’s conversation, but, surprisingly, she doesn’t allow it.

“I always feel like you listen to me,” she says, and she sounds sure of herself.

Once again, Grissom is surprised. Sara should know better than anyone how prone he is to misunderstanding others—and how often he tends to misrepresent himself. Over the years, there have been so many times when he has felt that they’ve reached an accord, only to later learn that she has taken something different from the exchange.

He always strives to listen to her, of course. But listening is such a complex act.

Last year, when he was losing his hearing, words started slipping away from him in conversation—first, only every once in a while, at the tail ends of sentences spoken at windy, outdoor crime scenes; then more frequently, sometimes indoors, often when the speaker had a back turned to him; then even sometimes when they were facing, a word or two per sentence; then whole sentences, whole chunks of conversation, even what was spoken loudly to him or yelled in close proximity.

Within a few months, he seemed to be underwater, and he felt a pain along his jaw and in strange contours of his skull, not like his annual migraines, but a dull bone hurt. Pressure built in his ears as if he were on a descending airplane and he needed them to pop, but nothing relieved what was obviously not a routine case of barotrauma, not yawning or swallowing or even driving mountain roads.

He lost his lower registers first and, with them, the underlying din of working machinery and background conversations at the lab; low voices like Jim’s, Warrick’s, and Nick’s; soundtracks to the television shows he watched when he was home from work. Then his middle hearing. Catherine’s speaking voice. The doorbell when his pizza deliveries arrived. Almost every conversation over the phone and PD walkies. He had to speech-read to cope.

Sara’s voice was one he could hear almost to the day he finally decided to undergo the reparative surgery. He kept waiting to lose it, but for the longest time he didn’t, which created the illusion that she somehow was close to him though everyone else was far away. He thought a lot then about what it might mean to lose her voice, to never be able to listen to her again, and the possibility was nearly unbearable. What he wanted was to listen to her forever, but he feared that he might never again have the chance, so he ended up pushing her away. A preemptive strike, or something to that effect.

The lab exploded, and—

“I try to,” he says, because that’s as much as he can do: to try and try and try.

Now they’re pulling onto the final street, and red and blue lights linger trapped below the clouds like fire and ice in the sky. Even from a full block away, the chaos from the accident is plainly visible. Deep tire ruts furrow the front lawn outside the house, and police cruisers, ambulances, and a tower fire engine crowd the streets and driveway around the property. Though the initial crash took place over two hours ago, neighbors still congregate beyond the police tape, some dressed in bathrobes and slippers, a few snapping photos on their phones. There are numerous teenagers around, tearstained and wrapped in blankets.

Grissom wants desperately to continue his conversation with Sara—to tell her that he will always try to listen to whatever she has to say to him, that she could tell him anything, and he would keep it close—but they’re coming up close to the barrier, and his time is gone.

They have to work the case.

Vartann and the fire chief familiarize them with the scene. The house is two stories tall and made mostly from stucco and brick. The pickup crashed through the living room window, leaving what looks like a jagged maw of glass, insulation, and shredded wood open into the night. It remains indoors, nose crushing up against the busted lacquer and snapped strings from what used to be a grand piano, its passenger still dead and bleeding in the cab.

Despite the city officials’ claims that the scene is safe for CSI to enter, the place looks dangerous. The pickup took out some of the house’s electrical wiring when it punched through the wall, and open currents shower the living room in bright, arc orange. Plaster dust hangs in the air, and one of the support beams upholding the top floor of the house appears noticeably cracked. Fire and rescue have brought in portable floodlights to illuminate the proceedings, casting the rubble in brilliant and startling relief. There is the unmistakable scent of gasoline escaping from the wreckage.

Grissom and Sara perform their initial walk-through with flashlights out. Grissom mostly pays attention to the house and the pickup—the alcohol stains still wet on the carpet where the partygoers dropped their drinks to dodge the truck; the fact that the dead passenger doesn’t appear to have been wearing a seatbelt—but he also sneaks a glance at the crowd beyond the police line and sees that the teenage survivors are seemingly dressed in costume: homemade togas swathed from bedsheets, vintage clothing clownishly mismatched, a boy in a bowler hat constructed entirely from duct tape. Though the driver of pickup was sixteen, some of these kids appear even younger. They stare with wide, sad eyes at Grissom as he stares back at them.

Soon Sara appears behind him, fresh from a conversation with Vartann. She stops at his side, and together they perch at the edge of the living room just where the wall gives away into the darker yard.

“Vartann says this is the drama club from Bonanza High,” she says. “This was supposed to be their back-to-school bash. Apparently, the driver wasn’t actually invited ’cause he quit the club last year.”

“So he was a gatecrasher,” Grissom says—and this time around, he doesn’t actually intend the pun, but Sara smirks anyway, as she often does at his bad jokes.

For a second, he feels as if they are insulated, somehow separate from the chattering crowd, the echoing calls from the rescue team, and the static from one-hundred walkies. Orange sparks from the snapped wires fan wild behind Sara, and a news chopper beats the air overhead, just a few miles off, cutting the clouds with its blades and pouring more light onto the spiraling scene. Sara stares at him in the way she sometimes does, as if she can see more to him than actually is there.

“You okay?” she asks.

“Uh—”

“You’ve just seemed maybe a little, uh, subdued. Not just tonight. For a while now. It’s, um, none of my business, I know, but I just—” She regathers. “Are you okay?”

Grissom is unprepared for her question. She is the one who hasn’t been all right for months, and she still might not be, for all he knows. He is only aware of some of her reasons for being brokenhearted, but even those are enough to justify the sadness he has so long seen in her. If anyone should be asked if they are okay, it is her, and he should be the one asking.

He is such a coward.

He feels immediately guilty but also, in spite of himself, grateful—grateful that she notices him, that she sees him, that she makes him feel as if he is not only a ghost or a dark thing lost in shadow but someone real and noticed, someone cast in light.

Sara is so good in a way that he is not, and he wrestles with what to tell her.

A busy crime scene isn’t the ideal place for this conversation, so maybe he would be smart to say only yes and alleviate her concern. After all, he can’t confess that he is miserable without her—that he knows he did wrong after the lab explosion, that he missed a chance he would give anything to have back. It wouldn’t be fair of him, after everything, and he refuses to hurt her any more than he already has.

But he also can’t bear to lie or to refuse what she is offering. Her gesture is so kind, so good, and he has wanted so much to reveal his frustration to someone. She might understand better than anyone what he is feeling, because she always does.

He winces. “Change is hard,” is all he can say—a platitude and obfuscation, nothing like what he actually means.

Sara considers him seriously. “It is,” she says in a small voice, almost too quiet to hear under the din of the scene. She’s still staring at him, unmoved from her place. “But it can be good, too. Worth it, you know? Sometimes you’ve got to adapt or—”

“—die,” he supplies.

She shakes her head. “Maybe. But sometimes you’ve got to adapt to live.”

She downplays her statement with a shrug, but Grissom marvels—at her, always braver than he is; always doing what he cannot do. He knows that what she says is hard-earned wisdom, something she has been striving to believe all summer and probably longer. She extends the lesson freely for him to take, as if her generosity were only a matter of course.

He loves her and is heartbroken but forces himself to smile. “Always the consummate Darwinist,” he says—high praise, they both know.

She smiles now. “We should probably take some more overalls. I think David just pulled up, and there’s the body.”

They work the case all night and into the light of morning, and though they have no more personal conversations, Sara is kind to him and careful in a way he recognizes, in the way he has tried to be kind to her and careful ever since last May. The crime scene remains loud and chaotic, first overrun by rescue teams and engineers and bystanders, then swarming news crews and memorialists. Still, she speaks to him in a soft voice, as if they were alone together in a room. Still, she is gentle and patient, and, though the work they do is intense, she never makes him feel as if they are in a rush.

The sun rises, and the clouds over the city begin to disperse, letting free the trapped lights, illuminating the house and yard. Grissom and Sara bag the last of their evidence and begin to collect their things, ready to return to the lab.

For a few moments, Sara is busy taking a carpet sample, and Grissom stands on a brick pile, waiting for her, sunning himself as if he were a lizard. He counts the times during the last decade of his life that he has been happy and is surprised to realize that the best of them are identical to her happy moments—to Marshall Beach and the hotel room and eating pizza on the floor. The thing that makes him happiest is her, plainly, simply, always.

“You ready?” she asks him, standing.

He wants to tell her yes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long delay on updates. My outside-the-internet life has been very busy for the last few months, so I appreciate your patience and continued readership. Y'all are the best.
> 
> P.S., Next chapter, we start getting into Season Five territory.


	8. Chapter 8

**VIII.**

She sees the shrink—er, counselor—er, _Mark_ —twice before she goes to Zion, once on Monday and once on Friday.

They’re starting to develop something almost like a rapport.

Sometimes they’re silent for minutes on end, but more often he speaks in full paragraphs, and she responds in monosyllables. When she does use complete sentences, they are vague and hypothetical. She never references anything definite or says anything substantial.

To his credit, he does his best to read between lines, knowing that he is unlikely to induce more information from her, even if he pushes. Though he lacks specifics, he can approximate well enough. What he says is generally applicable. Maybe she is less of a mystery than she might like to be, and he has her all figured out.

Of course, she never gives him the satisfaction of knowing.

She still hasn’t revealed anything to him about what happened at the B&B or in the years afterward, and she sure as hell hasn’t brought up Grissom. The most she has copped to is that her parents were shitty and that she has never been involved in what she would consider a successful romantic relationship. She did tell him that the last guy she dated cheated on her. Kind of.  

Thankfully, Mark is discerning enough to comprehend that her _trouble letting go_ is both multivalent and pervasive.

He levels with her during their Friday session. Her problem, he explains, is that she keeps waiting for a closure no one is ever going to give her.

“Sometimes things just end,” he says, shrugging, “—relationships, situations, jobs—and it’s maybe sudden or maybe not, but, either way, you just don’t get closure. There’s no good, solid breaking off point. There’s no goodbye. Maybe the thing even comes back a few times. Maybe it never really goes away. And if you’re a person who needs clear beginnings and endings, well—” He shrugs again.

She raises an eyebrow. “So you’re saying I’m SOL?”

“Not exactly,” he says. “Just because people or situations don’t give you closure doesn’t mean you can’t get it. You just have to get it for yourself.”

He is veering close to mysticism now, but Sara isn’t biting. She says nothing. He grants her a few seconds of silence, then goes on talking, unperturbed by her nonresponse.

“I know it’s artificial, but sometimes just ritualizing an ending helps. Some people cut up photographs after they go through a breakup, and high school kids—they have the graduation ceremony with caps and gowns, but they also go on senior trips, and that’s how they deal with saying goodbye to their friends even more than just saying goodbye to school.”

Mark’s advice sounds dangerously close to Grissom’s, but the closeness is an illusion, Sara realizes. Grissom thinks that what she needs is a breather, just a few days or weeks away from the lab to feel all right again. Mark is telling her that she needs to find some way to put an end to things that have no real endings on their own.

The suggestion is easier given than taken.

She has been trying to slam the door to the B&B behind her for twenty odd years and to figure out which side of the door she’s on with Grissom for the last four. If getting closure were as simple as snipping old photographs to bits or going on a road trip, she wouldn’t be in therapy. Anger closes in her chest like a fist.

“That’s arbitrary,” she says.

Mark doesn’t disagree. “Yeah,” he allows. “I mean, especially at first. You’re going to pick an arbitrary point, take some arbitrary action, and it won’t be apropos of anything. The only way it will help is if you supply the meaning.”

“You mean that if I just close my eyes and click my heels together three times, I’ll be able to let go?”

Her tone drips acid, even more so than she’d meant it to. She feels the same way she did as a teenager when she went to her guidance counselor for help with the kind of problems that only a kid in her position would have. The lady fed her platitude after platitude about how everything would be okay in the end, but all she wanted was for someone to tell her how she was supposed to finance her university education, given her particular logistics.

The power of positive thinking is awesome, she’s sure, but there’s make-believe, and then there’s real life, and she’s always been stuck with the latter. Even full scholarships don’t cover East Coast living expenses after tuition and housing, and not every kid has parents to fall back on. Just saying that something is over doesn’t mean it is. She is sick to her stomach of people pretending that optimism will solve her problems.

Mark remains tranquil. He speaks matter-of-factly. “I’m not talking Oz here, Sara. I’m talking neurophysiology. You’ve got to retrain your brain. You work the nightshift, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. So when you first started going to work at night and sleeping during the day, that had to be rough, right? What did you do? Drink lots of caffeine? Eat late meals? Buy blackout curtains?”

Sara doesn’t want to explain that she has been mostly nocturnal since childhood—the topic is one that borders her list of nonstarters—so she humors him.

“Sure.”

“You still need all that stuff to be awake for work?”

“I mean, the curtains help, but, no, not really.”

She senses him honing in on his point, and she prepares to dislike whatever he says.

He stares at her over the rims of his glasses. “So what I’m hearing from you is that, using artificial means, you’ve basically trained your body and mind to register night as day.” She allows the assertion. “Okay. So now you don’t need all those artificial means anymore. You just respond naturally.” Again, she allows him. “Well, it’s the same principle with ritualizing closure.”

She tries to explain her hang-up. “Okay,” she says. “So let’s say I, uh, ritualize an ending. I cut up a photograph and say, ‘This means it’s over now,’ and that’s supposed to work, even if, uh—” She hesitates, unsure how to phrase her query without revealing more than she wants to. “—even if I’m still coming into, uh, into contact with whatever it is. If I can’t help but be around it. Or it’s not gone. Not over. Just still there.”

Mark shrugs. “Well, I mean, there’s more to it than that. You can’t just cut up a photo and wipe your hands. That’s just a step. Actually, kind of a final one. You’ve gotta do some emotional work first. You’ve gotta really look at yourself and why you’ve held onto the thing for so long. Ask some hard questions about whether or not the thing you’re holding onto is ever going to truly make you happy—realistically, not just as something that you’re wishing for.”

Here, Mark pauses, and Sara can tell that he wants her to say something revealing—to open up to him about what it is she is holding onto exactly—but she isn’t about to break her own rules. She shrugs, noncommittal, and he has no choice but to continue the conversation himself.

“Think about if you’re avoiding something,” he says, “maybe putting off dealing with loss, maybe clinging to something or someone because you fear being alone. Keep asking yourself why you’re doing that and evaluating where you want to be—and that’s the hard part, because then you’ve got to take action. If you actually want to let go of these things, then you’ve gotta make changes. If you can’t physically get away from the thing or cut it out of your life, then find a new way to approach it. Talking with someone else about the changes you plan on taking might help. If you’re not comfortable discussing them with me, then you should try maybe sitting down with a friend.”

“I don’t really, uh—” She tries to smile but probably grimaces instead.

Mark is sympathetic. “So somebody, then. A family member. A religious leader. Maybe your supervisor.”

Sara ignores this last, most impractical suggestion because there is no way she is going to talk to Grissom about why she can’t seem to get over him. But the closure ritualization she considers.

She doesn’t know how to apply this processing method—to her childhood, to her present reality, to Grissom—and she still isn’t certain that ritualizing closure is possible for her. In the past, she has had opportunities to say, _Okay, so it’s over_. She could have made clean breaks, lain things to rest. But she has never known how to, and, honestly, she isn’t sure that she is even fully capable. There has always been a wall inside her, and she has always been unable to surmount it, no matter how hard she has tried. Now she’s being told she has to dismantle the thing brick by brick.

She wants to be able to, but.

“Just think it over,” Mark tells her.

On the drive back to her apartment, she weighs pros and cons. Maybe cutting up a photograph would make her feel better in the short term, but what about when she goes back to work next week? What about when Grissom is standing right in front of her, looking her in the eyes? What about everything else?

There are times when she thinks coping, when for a while she feels that she is able to function. But then, inevitably, something will set her off. She’ll work a case with details that are too familiar; smell smoke from her mother’s old brand of cigarettes; see some man whose walk is like her father’s; and suddenly she’ll be trapped behind her eyes, nauseous and wary, a goddamn eight year-old again.

Sometimes even if there is nothing to set her off, the stability itself gets to her. She starts feeling anxious just because nothing awful has happened to her in a while. It’s like she is living on borrowed luck, and she knows it will run out soon enough. She can’t stop checking over her shoulder.

Recently, she has felt that way all the time, like she is a bomb with a thousand tripwires hanging from her, any one of them liable to snag at any moment.

How does Mark’s suggestion account for those kinds of reactions, the ones she has never been able to either anticipate or prevent? What happens after she has cut up all the photographs, but she still has innumerable snapshots catalogued in her head—so many invisible sticking points and sensory memories, all the years and years of maladaptive history?

During her first year truly on her own, she tried to fashion herself into a new person, leaving all her issues behind, but before she even realized what she was doing—before the first semester had even ended—she had already begun to fail, not making friends like she should, caring too much about grades and the opinions professors had of her, throwing herself at boys she knew would only lie to her, never sleeping, overworking, still jumping at every sharp noise down the hall.

It was like an out-of-body experience. She could see herself in perfect microcosm. She could identify the exact ways in which she was failing. She even knew what she would have to do to fix her problems and behave better. But somehow she just couldn’t. She had no choice but to malfunction. She felt as if she were in a car wreck, behind the wheel and watching everything happen in slow motion, glass shattering and aluminum compacting around her body, her whole life grinding to a sick, hard stop.  

If she couldn’t make a clean break then, moving across the country, leaving behind everything she had known, starting on a new life, how can she make a clean break now, when the situation is so completely arbitrary and her circumstances haven’t changed?

By the time she gets back to her apartment, she feels almost worse than she did before she went to her therapy session. She knows that Mark isn’t trying to overwhelm her, but she is just so tired, and she needs something tangible so she can get by. She wants to be the kind of person who gets better. She wants to wake up without anger grinding like a gear in her chest. She wants to not feel so undeserving and hopelessly busted inside. To hold down the same job for more than four years, to really make friends, to know how to open to people. To be stable enough to maintain a relationship. To not make the same mistakes over and over again. Mostly, she wants not to be tired anymore.

In the hours prior to her departure for Utah, she fights with herself, pacing her living room and staring out her back window over the Strip.

So many events in her life have been out of her control—other people making decisions for her or making decisions that affect her without regard for her at all. She so seldom has had any say in what has happened to her and how and when. Not at the B&B. Not in the fallout afterward. Not with Grissom. Not even with this fucking PEAP. She just wants to make a choice for herself for once, to finally say when something is over rather than being told that it is.

Especially with Grissom, she didn’t even realize that something was ending until it already had.

It was October, and a chill had already begun to traipse into the city from the Bay, settling into the bricks and mortar. She was feeling frustrated with her work, stuck in a rut. Then Grissom called her to him in Vegas, and it was like traveling to a whole new planet. In Vegas, the air still shined, red and sweltering, during the late evenings. The desert still fired like a kiln. She was glad to leave the SFPD and the cold weather behind. Glad to go to him.

To have someplace to go.

Someone to go to.

For a few weeks, they got caught up in the rush, the heat—the busyness of her moving states, switching jobs, fitting in as part of his team, his department, his world; the strangeness of him becoming everyone’s boss when for years he’d resisted management. The whole runaround exhausted them, him because he had new responsibilities and a personnel crisis on his hands, her because she was closing out old cases in San Francisco at the same time that she was opening new cases in Las Vegas. There was the hassle of her moving into a new apartment, finding a new bank and insurance agent and grocery store and doctor’s office, of trying to make nice with the people who’d been Grissom’s coworkers for years but who saw her as the new girl and potential nark. Transferring her entire life from California to Nevada in less than two weeks required multiple flights back and forth between states and dashing from orientation seminars and security screenings at the lab to lease-signings and credit checks with her new landlady at the complex office.

Still.

She and Grissom found time for each other, those first few weeks—stolen time, dizzied time.

Ordering pizza, which they ate sitting on the floor of her new apartment, her possessions stacked in box towers around them while most of her furniture was still in transit, somewhere along I-5. Rushing after work, at the Grissom’s insistence, to the top of the Stratosphere, because, in his opinion, she had to see the view just once as a tourist, when she wasn’t working. Running errands together: to the licensing bureau to get new plates for her car, to the hardware store to buy last-minute items for her place. Grissom showing off his tech toys to her at the lab. Treating her to his favorite off-Strip restaurant. Telling her about how, sometimes, when the neon lights get too much for him, he drives out on Blue Diamond Road just to see the stars.

Stupid things.

Nice things.

Every first in Vegas was an experiment. She wondered if this dizzied existence was the new normal for them or prelude to something different. Were they making habits or waiting to make habits? She kept expecting things to slow down after the final reports were filed on the Gribbs case, but of course nothing ever slowed down. Life never does. She kept holding her breath and thinking that someday she and Grissom would have the chance to figure out something regular: a routine, a relationship.

At least at first, she seemed to have good reasons to hope.

Grissom was—what?—charming, encouraging. He seemed just as eager as she was.

But somewhere in the tangle of the transition, something changed, and Sara didn’t notice it changing at first—didn’t notice _him_ changing, _them_ changing—didn’t realize what was happening until she had already been in Vegas for months and had carved out a regular existence, a routine—only one that didn’t involve a relationship with Grissom, or at least not the kind of relationship with Grissom that she’d been holding her breath for.

By then, even the desert had turned cold.

They weren’t running errands together anymore. He wasn’t coming over to her place, and she wasn’t going over to his. All the conversations she’d expected to have with him never transpired. They never talked about anything but work. They never talked anywhere but at work. Somehow, they communicated less than they ever had before, even though she had moved 500 miles to be near him. There were no more dinners or sightseeing. There was no more introduction to the secret places of the city. They saw each other with less and less frequency outside the lab until they were almost strangers again. It was as if he had forgotten her address.

She had moved to Vegas expecting they would be together, but now they were further apart than ever. Maybe if Grissom had just been honest with her up front and said _I can’t do this_ , she could have come to understand or make peace. Something. But there was never a hard no—or at least not one that ever completely stuck.

Even now, years later, the amorphousness of the space between them still confuses her. Sometimes they’ll go weeks barely acknowledging each other’s existence, as far apart from each other as two people working at the same place can be, but then they’ll have these moments—these stupidly intense moments—where suddenly they’re connected again, and she can’t do anything but feel.

Sometimes it’s like it was standing pressed up against those bloodied sheets, like they just have to have each other, like they’re all the heat and noise in the world.

Other times, it’s quieter.

He’ll take her by the arm as they’re walking the perimeter at a scene or send her a look across a crowded room, like they already have each other.

Like they’ve had each other all along.

Either way, when the moments end, she hurts all over again, fresh like she did the first time she realized that, despite what she had intended, she has ended up alone in Sin City, the same as she has always been alone.

Thinking about it again now, an ache splits through her chest.

“Stupid,” she says aloud, watching the sun set indigo behind the Spring Mountains. “You have to just—”

She doesn’t finish her sentence and goes instead to her nightstand, where she takes from the drawer with uncertain hands Grissom’s six-page letter. She can’t believe that there is any ritual powerful enough to move her past her childhood or break the worst of her dysfunctional patterns, but maybe this one thing she could lay to rest, and maybe then she’d be able to continue forward—to go along with only her regular wounds instead of her regular wounds plus this deep, hard bruise from Grissom.

For a few seconds, she can do nothing, but then she finds her way back to her task. She buries Grissom’s letter and an old butane lighter from her smoking days deep in her hiking pack and tells herself she’ll only take them out if she feels up to it—that she doesn’t have to do anything if she doesn’t want to, and she doesn’t have to tell Mark, either way.

Later that night, she leaves Vegas, setting out under moonlight, navigating a map of stars down the long, black causeway of I-15. There’s hardly anyone on the road with her besides an occasional semi-truck, and she feels like the last woman on earth, as if everything and everyone else died away with the daylight.

The drive takes about three hours, and she stops just once along the way, pulling in at an all-but-abandoned service station close to the state line. The night air swelters, and, as she fills her tank, she leans back against the hot exterior of her car and closes her eyes, listening to the soundtrack of the desert at night, the mournful owls and blaring insects, the trucks passing out on the freeway, the skittering and rustling of dried plants and blown sand carrying on the wind.

She does eighty for most of the ride and arrives in Springdale, Utah just outside the park around half past four in the morning—a decent hour for her, though the little town is still mostly asleep. She finds a cheap motel to check into, and, when she says she wants a room for one, single bed, the night clerk gives her a worried look; a lone woman traveling during the wee hours must seem as if she is running away from something.

Maybe she is.

After stashing her stuff inside her suite, she remains outside the motel, leaned up against her car again, facing the sandstone cliffs that mark the entrance to the park. It’s times like these that she misses smoking, not chemically, with the ghost of an old addiction, but because smoking gave her something to do—an excuse to stand outside alone, an action to take with her hands, a way to kill time.

In spite of herself, she wonders what Grissom would have to say about what she has come to Zion to do.

Sometimes his comfort with the unprovable surprises her. At first blush, he comes off as so hyper-rational, but the truth is that he is a believer, much more so than she has ever been, and not just in the sense that, despite his protestations, he is still in some ways Catholic, while she is agnostic, but in the sense that he can be at peace with not knowing—with lacking hard answers and empirical evidence—in a way that she can’t be.

The insoluble maddens her. She always has to know for sure. The only way she can live with not knowing the full depth of something is if she genuinely doesn’t care to know; otherwise, she feels compelled to pursue the truth to its fullest extremity.

He isn’t the same. He doesn’t hate ambiguity or the unanswerable. He can live with uncertainty and easily admit when he isn’t sure of something. It’s actually one of his better qualities as a scientist and as a human being. But it’s also a quality that kills her.

She can’t be okay with the way things are between them, with knowing that they share that unnamable feeling but will never do anything about it. She can’t be okay with not knowing why they’ve never tried to make things work.

He can.

It’s as simple and as complicated as that.

If she called him up right now and demanded that he tell her his intentions, he would have no problem saying that he doesn’t know, because that’s the truth. She saw it in his eyes when they were out in the desert. She heard it in his voice. He has no idea what to do, and he can exist in the gray, in the nebulous uncertainty, hesitating indefinitely, while she can hardly breathe.

That’s why she needs closure.

She doesn’t believe that he is trying to string her along or that he wants her to suffer. He just doesn’t know how to be anything other than he is, just like she doesn’t know how to be anything other than she is. If he were capable of taking action, he would. But he isn’t. She just can’t allow his non-decision to keep ruling her life is all. Six years is a long time to wait.

Too long.

There are so many things she has put on hold for him or missed out on entirely—and she realizes that he never asked her to give anything up for him; she just assumed. Still. She has turned down parties and dates, done that messy, awful, slowly slumping-to-the-floor dance with Hank. She has always saved a place for Grissom at the table in her heart, expecting him to return home.

In September, she’ll be thirty-three years old, and what does she have to show for her life? She hasn’t advanced her career since she moved to Vegas. She still spends her free time entirely alone. Her best friends are her coworkers, and none of them really knows her, not beyond a surface level. She still flinches at raised voices. Still rages and rages and is spent.

None of that’s on Grissom, of course. It’s on her and how she reacts to him. She has been living her life in suspended animation, waiting for him, because she hasn’t known how to do anything else.

Because she has been afraid to be alone.

The sun rises sometime before six o’clock, gilding Springdale over. Only after the sharpest glare disappears beyond the sedimentary peaks does Sara return to her motel room. She channel surfs. Showers. Pretends, for a while, to sleep. Makes coffee with the old Sunbeam machine on the dresser. Then, once the sky has fully blued, she drives to the park, paying for a five-day pass.

Zion is greener than anywhere in the Las Vegas Valley. Trees and bushes gather at the cliff bases and tuft the plateaus like crewcuts on jarheads. The verdancy brings out the rust and orange on the sandstone, casting the whole park in sharp contrasting color.  

Wanting to avoid crowds, she purposefully steers clear of the main roads, taking her time to explore as the thermometer mercury rises with the day heat. When she happens upon interesting formations, she stops and disembarks her car, hiking out into the desert.

Barring the occasional group of college kids in Birkenstocks and backpacks, she is alone. She has her camera with her, and she snaps photographs of formations and wildlife along the trails. Copper and patina creeks wander through the wastes and jagged gorges, and lizards hot step across the sand, seeking refuge beneath small, brave flowers.  

For a long time, Sara stares out across the expanse, the great, fossilized stone sea with its arching, petrified reefs and alien terrain. The park represents eons of desolation, and there is a certain terror in the expanse of it, but also beauty, lonesome and still.

The heat becomes intolerable just after midday, and, when it does, she returns to town and stows away in a diner to wait out sundown. The place is crowded with locals and tourists, every booth occupied by cowboy hats and plastic visors, but it is still nothing like Vegas, still somehow quieter and more self-contained.

With no one to pay her any mind, Sara allows herself a leisurely meal at a table by the window, and, after she finishes, she peruses the gift shop. Between the small ceramic sculptures of the park’s most famous formations and polished rocks for sale in bins, she finds a postcard of Angels Landing. It’s simple—just an image of the cliffs, no words and no kitsch. She turns it over in her hands.

Before she left Las Vegas, Grissom worried about her traveling to Zion on her own. He didn’t voice them, but she knew he had causes for concern. Working the job they do, they can’t help but know statistics. Bad things happen to lone hikers. Bad things happen to lone women. People who are lonely sometimes do bad things to themselves. He didn’t want her to wander out into the desert and never come back.

His concern was sweet, though in the way that ties slipknots inside of her, just another ambiguity muddling the distinction between what they are and what they maybe wish they could be. He looked at her again like she was made of glass, and he was scared of everything that could break her. Now she tries to downplay the care she saw in his eyes. She came out here to move on, not to overanalyze his motives.

Sometimes she thinks she really is pathetic, like her mother, willing to count so little for so much.

Logically, she knows she doesn’t owe Grissom anything and that it isn’t her duty to assuage his anxieties. But emotionally, she wants to. It’s a childhood fault, something that a previous therapist linked to her parentalization, growing up in a house with alcoholics. Ever since she was very small, she has always been responsible for caring for other people’s feelings and saving them from themselves. Now, the impulse is ingrained in her. Even though she knows that she doesn’t have to reach out to Grissom—that she _shouldn’t_ , for her own sake—the habit is a hard one to break. Over the years, he has told her so many times and in so many ways that he depends on her.  

She carries the postcard up to the counter, and she’s already lying to herself, insisting that this action is only a kindness on her part: something that she wants to do, not an obligation, nothing codependent.

The clerk behind the counter informs her that the mail has already been sent out for the day, and maybe she should take the fact that she is too late—that she’ll have to wait—as some kind of cosmic sign.

She doesn’t, of course.

“No worries,” she says, smiling, and buys the card plus a stamp to send it with.

Using the pen chained to the counter, she fills in the address lines and greeting section, a short message saying that she has arrived in Zion safely. With each ink stroke, she rationalizes to herself that at least she isn’t sending a letter or placing a goddamn call.

The clerk behind the counter returns her smile and has no idea.

She plans to post the card on Monday.

Near sunset, she heads back to the park, switching on her high beams as the heavens turn from fire to dark. She passes groups of off-roaders, traveling farther into Zion than she has before, and she doesn’t stop until she can be sure she is alone. Soon there are almost more stars than black in the sky, and the park comes alive with primordial sound, cracklings and whoops and rustlings emanating from the void.

She goes to exactly the kind of place that would worry Grissom if he could see her there: nondescript, isolated, out-of-the-way; a nowhereland where she could get lost forever were something to go wrong.

Beneath a rock formation, she produces first the letter from her pack and then the lighter. It takes her two tries to flip the flint wheel before she achieves ignition, and even then she has to cup her hand against the breeze before the paper burns. Slow, slow, then suddenly she’s watching flame sprint the looping paths of Grissom’s cursive, blacking over the paper until the lines crack and feather away, cinders catching in the wind, disappearing over the desert.

She feels stupid, watching, and heartsore, watching, but she also thinks that maybe this could be it: her new start, the change she needs.

“Take care of yourself,” she says, and at first she believes that she is speaking to the absent Grissom, parting from him with a breakup cliché, but then she realizes the sentiment is maybe more apropos for her.

Mark advised that she should reflect prior to the ritual, but she waits to consider what it is that she means to let go of until after she has stomped the last licking flames to the dirt beneath her boot sole.

She was twenty-six years old when she fell in love with Gil Grissom, and she had already known, even back then that despite all the stories and songs and movies and sentimental bullshit out there in the universe, falling in love doesn’t fix problems; there are no princes charging in on white horses, and any happy ending that can be summed up in a single sentence likely isn’t as great as the byline makes it out to be; life just happens; and people who promise to be good to each other sometimes make horrible companions—often make horrible companions—even despite their best efforts to live together beautifully.

She had known since she was a little girl better than to expect the fairytale or to believe that someday she would find someone who could truly make her happy. She wasn’t even looking for that guy, for that kind of maudlin Mr. Right, which is why it’s so stupid that when she met Grissom, she somehow forgot everything she had already known.

She loved Grissom foolishly, and she loved him recklessly, and he seemed so much like he had come out of a fairytale that she naïvely believed he had somehow pulled her into one. He was so perfect, so brilliant, so charming, so handsome, and so kind, someone she instantly trusted, like she couldn’t help herself but place her faith in him. She supposed, after that first conference, when everything felt as if it had clicked into place, that the good life would naturally follow—that what was going on between them would progress as just easily and happily as it had started, and in a year’s time— _fuck_ —she can barely even think it now.

Mark asked her to consider what she has been holding onto and why she has clung to it for so long. The thing she’s held onto, she thinks, is hope, and she has held onto it because— _God_ —she imagined that, with Grissom, maybe she could be happy.

In the beginning, she was happy.

She was happy thinking that they perhaps had a _someday_ , and that’s why for years she has waited for him. She has waited as she has gotten older, as he has gotten older, as their lives have changed but also stayed too much the same. She has watched him flirt with pretty anthropologists and professors and told herself again and again that it didn’t matter, because what they had was special, and maybe soon their _someday_ would arrive.

What mattered was that he loved her, didn’t he?

He loves her.

So she has waited for him—waited to be happy—waited for _someday_ —convincing herself that everything would be worthwhile if only that possibility, that small, sweet hope, were to finally come through.

But that’s the irony, isn’t it?

If she waits forever, she never will be happy.

The realization settles over her like night over the desert.

Overhead, the stars defy counting, surpassing all human mathematical efforts. They are infinite and pitiless and beautiful, and she is in a sea of stone, and Grissom isn’t with her. For a moment, she allows herself to think about how she has always been alone and will be until she dies. She is lonesome in the same way that the desert is lonesome, and maybe nature intended things that way.

Maybe she was designed for it.

When she returns to Springdale, she buys a convenience store six-pack and drinks until she falls asleep on the couch in her motel room. The next day, she doesn’t visit the park at all. Her head aches, and her skin feels tight with sunburn, so she mostly stays in bed, flipping through cable movies and wondering if she is a sucker. A few times, she glances at the postcard on the nightstand and thinks she might be sick. She forces herself to shower somewhere around eight o’clock at night and orders a pizza to her room. Only once she is clean and has eaten does she start to feel better.

There is a bench outside the motel lobby, and she goes there to sit and count her thoughts, considering her internal state of affairs, wondering if the ritual has freed her like Mark promised that it would. She doesn’t know about being free, but she does think, maybe, that she feels different. Like something has shifted. Not in regards to Grissom, but in regards to her.

By Monday, when she sends the postcard, she almost feels sorry for him.

After spending the Fourth of July together in the desert, she can be sure that he is waiting, aching, for her to return home to Vegas, because that’s how she would feel, were the situation reversed. If he never attempts to change, then he is always going to be waiting. At least she is trying to move on.

Maybe that makes her the lucky one.

Tuesday and Wednesday, she spends in Zion, taking in the more popular attractions: the Narrows, Observation Point, Angels Landing, Kolob Canyon. She feels mostly well, except for when a family asks her to use their camera to take a picture of them at Taylor Creek. There’s a father, a mother, and two elementary school-aged children. They smile at her through the viewfinder, pressed together and embracing, and when they say _Cheese_ in unison, sadness rips at a seam in her chest.

Thursday, she makes a day trip to nearby Bryce Canyon, an hour’s drive from Zion. The terrain there is different, populated by rock hoodoos, and the sun feels brighter, more like Vegas. Looking out from a scenic overview, she assesses, again, how she feels inside, the way that her pieces have shifted and fallen together into a new shape.

The truth is that she isn’t over Grissom. If he were to call her now and ask her if they could start over, she would say yes in heartbeat, maybe faster, and forgive him everything these last six years, loving him recklessly all over again. The only difference is that now she isn’t deluding herself into expecting a call. She knows it isn’t a possibility. She loves him, and he loves her, but nothing can or will ever come from it. For the first time since the conference, she has admitted to herself that there will never be a _someday_.

She isn’t sure how she’s supposed to feel, everything considered, but by Friday, as she’s driving home to Vegas, she thinks she can at least name what she is feeling: breathlessness, the same way she has felt it a thousand times before.

It’s like when she was a kid, when she expected her parents to change, when they promised her that they would get sober, do better, and then they didn’t, or, afterwards, when she would get her heart set on the idea of being wanted, only no one ever did want her, not permanently, not for more than a few weeks or months at a time.

Not once she became inconvenient.

She feels as if she has had the breath knocked out of her, and the hurt is so sharp and so quick that she can’t cry out, only wince.

She spends Saturday and Sunday alone in her apartment, just trying to catch her breath again, and by Monday, when she returns to the lab, she thinks she finally has mastered the trick.

Grissom tells her, “I need you on this 406 with me and Warrick.”

She takes a deep breath and forces a smile.

“No problem,” she says.

So she works the case with Grissom, because what else can she do? She tries to remain even, to be pleasant and helpful but also restrained.

Grissom has other ideas.

In the past, whenever he was watching her, Sara knew he was because she was waiting for him, hoping. She was aware reflexively, as a flower might be aware of sunrise. His attention on her was a prize, something she angled for, wanted; something that made her bloom.

Now she is aware that he is watching her only because he is.

Only because he is obvious.

He is probably watching her no more often than usual, but her awareness creates the illusion of frequency, as if he has been doing so a lot ever since she returned from Zion. She can’t ignore his eyes on her—can’t ignore _him_. She feels as if he is staring at her the whole time they’re working the home invasion case.

They’re back to the scene for a second time, processing, of all things, a child’s playhouse in the backyard, which the burglars may have used it as a hideout prior to breaking into the family home. The structure is only large enough to fit one adult person comfortably and two in a cram, so Sara is on her hands and knees, examining the interior, while Grissom and Warrick remain outside, snapping overalls and searching for anything probative in the surrounding landscaping.

It is night, and the darkness casts the playhouse shadowy and claustrophobic. Sara feels like a giant, surrounded by third-scale furniture and plastic household items. She communicates with Grissom and Warrick through the open playhouse door.

“It’s a mess in here,” she says, “—but that could just be from the kids.”

She can see Warrick through the open door. He has his back to her and stands a few feet off, snapping photographs of the rosebushes along the back fence. He doesn’t turn around, but he does offer a suggestion.

“If two grown men were in there, there’s gotta be some trace. Small space like that, there’s no way they staked out for four hours without leaving something behind.”

Grissom remains closer to the playhouse, slowly walking the perimeter, casing its details. He pores over the fixtures and moldings with his flashlight. Sara can see him in the peripheries of her vision through the playhouse window. She watches as his light moves, tracing the corners of the structure. He doesn’t speak, and she can’t be sure whether he is listening to her and Warrick’s conversation or not.

“Well, we know they were wearing gloves,” Sara says, referencing a previous finding from inside the family home. She opens a tiny cupboard to reveal a Fisher Price tea set. “—so there won’t be fingerprints.”

Warrick has now stooped to observe something in the grass. He still has his back to her. “I’m thinking they had to have rubbed up against something. I mean, you’re what, five-nine, five-ten? Even crouched, your head is up by the ceiling. Our suspects are both over six feet. Maybe check the ceiling for hair or fibers—”

“Or the walls for shoe prints,” Sara says, imagining the two suspects sitting with their backs up against one wall, their boot soles touching the other.

She shines her flashlight over the surface, looking for smudges, but finds nothing—or at least nothing visible to the naked eye. It occurs to her that if she were to use an ALS, something might appear. She glances out the playhouse window, wanting to ask Grissom to pass in the tool that she needs from her kit, which she left outside on the lawn. She is surprised to see him already staring at her through the glass, his expression somber and intense but otherwise indecipherable.

“Hey. Could you grab me an ALS?”

Having worked with Grissom for nearly four years now, Sara knows that, at crime scenes, he has a tendency to look past the physical and what’s present, staring into space, imagining scenarios, playing out theories in his mind’s eye.

But right now, he isn’t focused on the case.

He looks at her like she is the only bright thing in the darkness. It takes him a few seconds to even respond to her question, stepping away from the window and over to her kit on the lawn. When he hands the ALS through the playhouse door to her, he offers her a smile, only it seems more like a grimace. His eyes linger just a few seconds too long, and she cannot avoid the fervency of his gaze.

The rest of the night brings more of the same.

Sara lifts a partial shoe print from the playhouse wall, so the CSIs return to the main house to collect footwear from the family closets for rule-outs. The wife has a shopping habit, so Sara is sitting in the master closet, sorting through what must be nearly fifty pairs of designer boots, heels, sandals, and flats. Grissom had gone to the oldest son’s room and Warrick to the younger son and daughter’s. They’ve each been in their separate corners of the house for some time, and Sara has become engrossed in her task. She uses up the stack of evidence bags she had beside her and turns to grab more from her kit.

Grissom is standing in the closet doorframe, watching her.

She starts, surprised that he managed to enter the room without her noticing. He hadn’t made any noise. Hadn’t said anything. His flashlight isn’t on. Darkness swathes him from head to toe. She tries to downplay her shock, but he catches on, offering her an apologetic look. Clearly, he didn’t mean to sneak up. He bends down to pick up the bags from her kit, passing them over the threshold into the closet for penance. His eyes stay on her.

“Sorry,” he says.

She shakes her head, a demurral, and takes the bags from his hand. “This lady must max out her credit cards.” She indicates the mountain of shoes, meaning the statement to be lighthearted, a joke, but Grissom doesn’t laugh.

“Yeah,” he says, and his eyes never move.

He continues watching her as they migrate from the upstairs to the down, rummaging the husband’s hiking boots out from the hall closet. He watches her on the drive back to the lab, with her in the driver’s seat, Warrick in the passenger’s seat, and him in the back, looking up at her, hangdog, in the rearview. It’s always the same expression, the same melancholy intensity that she cannot read. She gets the feeling he is trying to figure her out. Maybe he senses that something is different now, ever since she’s come back from the desert.

All she knows is she can’t stand it.

He follows her around the lab, turning up in places where she is, offering her those sad half-smiles. They wrap the home invasion case, and he pulls her in with him and Catherine on a murder in Paradise, not far from McCarran. He never says anything. Just watches. Worries, she supposes.

But the more he fixates, the more she squirms.

He’s not making it easy, trying to move on.

Before her trip to Zion, she would have read too much into all his attention on her. She would have thought that maybe he was working up the nerve to ask her something, that maybe his fixation on her meant that a new development was around the corner. She would have allowed his looks give her _hope_.

—and if she’s honest with herself, she has to admit that, even after burning his letter, his staring does stir in her some fluttery thing.

Her impulse is still to think, _Maybe if I just give him time_.

But the difference is that now she stomps the impulse down. She fights herself and won’t permit her heart to get set on something that can’t ever happen. She’s even logical. The more she thinks about how he looks at her, the more she knows the name for what she sees in his eyes.

_Guilt._

She is his unfinished business. He’s looking at her, knowing it’s a shame, the way they are now, but not seeing any way to move either backwards or forwards. He loves her, but he’ll never act on his feelings. He hasn’t come to terms with the situation.

But she’s trying to.

They are scoping out their murder victim’s office. Catherine is down the hall, checking the maintenance closet for the same kind of chemicals a tox screen discovered in the victim’s system.

They have already spoken to the victim’s secretary, who told them the victim was a jerk to his coworkers, a cheat to customers, a pig to women, a real piece of work all around. According to her, he had a lot of enemies. The company’s assistant manager and HR director agree.

It’s early morning, and the light in the office is tawny and soft. Sara is sifting through the contents of the victim’s trashcan, while Grissom is stopped at his desk, considering his papers. Grissom picks up one of several framed photos from a small collection and examines it.

“Family man,” he muses. “Wife, four kids, dog—and if his _World’s Best Dad_ mug is to be believed, they genuinely loved him. Curious that someone whom most people found so repellant could also inspire adoration within the walls of his own home.”

Sara shrugs. “Well, most men aren’t islands.” She means the quip to be wry, but when she looks up, Grissom’s brow is deeply furrowed, and his mouth is tight. He appears struck, maybe hurt. She didn’t mean to say anything offensive, and certainly not to imply anything about him. On impulse, she offers a conciliatory smile and says something to smooth her previous statement. “Sometimes people who are combative out in the world take off their armor when they go home to the people they feel safe with.”

Grissom gives her one of his unreadable looks. “Better that than the other way around.”

Now it’s her turn to wince.

He has hit a sore spot without meaning to.

For a split instant, she wonders if he can read her reaction—if he can tell why she has flinched, what she is thinking, what she has come from—but then he has his back to her as he is reaching for something else on the victim’s desk, and she knows he is oblivious.

She wishes she could say that she relaxes then—that the adrenaline recedes from her system—and she passes the rest of the morning unfazed.

But she doesn’t.

She is helpless, remembering, weak and woozy, a child again.

She is there with her father and his best friend, Vince, who owned a hardware store. In her mind’s eye, the two men are laughing over sodas on the sidewalk in downtown Marshall, the closest thing to a town near their part of the bay. She is seven years old, hovering nearby, hanging off a parking meter as if it were playground equipment, remaining in her father’s sightline, per his instructions. She half-listens to the men talk about normal things, like how her father needs a new A/C unit for the guest house and which one Vince thinks he should buy.

Even as young as she is, she knows that when her father takes her home, no one will be laughing.

She tries to spin the handle on the meter but can’t make it turn over without a quarter in the coin door. Her hands are small and weak, unable to fit the machine. When her father calls her name, she runs to him, obedient.

Time speeds, and they are coming home. Her mother has been left alone all day with run over the B&B and house. There is some kind of mess on the living room carpet, scissors and cuttings everywhere. Black trash bags have been taped over the windows.

Sara’s hands are still too small, and now they shake.

The memories are more scattershot, flashes, sharp sounds, here, there.

She tries to stay present, focusing on the investigation, but she can feel herself slipping behind her eyes, her actions becoming more rote, her responses minimal and uninflected.

Over the years, there have been many occasions when something has set her off at work. Usually, she knows how to ride out the upset so that none of her coworkers realizes that anything is bothering her.

Not this time.

Grissom is so fixated on her, and the more she retreats inside herself, the more he becomes aware that something is wrong. It starts with him asking her to pass him a tape lift and her missing his question, obliging him repeat himself. He says her name who knows how many times before she responds. From then on, he is clued in. She doesn’t know what her expression looks like, but he seems to discern the tension in her. If possible, his staring intensifies, suddenly naked with concern. Even when Catherine returns from the maintenance closet bearing a bottle of solvent that has ingredients matching the victim’s panel results, Grissom doesn’t stop watching her like she is an unfolding tragedy.

She wants to be able to put on a brave face because she knows that he is blaming himself for _something_ —even if he doesn’t know why exactly she is upset—and really he has done nothing wrong. He couldn’t have known that what he said would get in her head this way. It isn’t his fault that she can’t talk shop about their work and just be cool about things. At this point, she wishes he would just stop furrowing his brow so much. She needs him to stick to the case so that she could stick to the case, too.

They’ve finished processing the office, and they’re securing their bagged evidence in the truck. Catherine has gone back inside the building to fetch the final load, so Grissom and Sara are momentarily alone. Sara bends to push their kits further into the trunk, making room for what is to come. When she stands again, Grissom’s hand is at the small of her back, stabilizing her. The touch is light enough that it could almost be incidental, but Sara knows better. She looks to him, and his expression is so sorry, not for the contact but for whatever he thinks he has done. Her heart twists in her chest.

That’s the image that stays with her, even once she returns home after the shift is done: Grissom seeming so small and guilty, blaming himself for a thousand things, none of which are his fault.

She thinks about it all day, about how he believes that he is responsible for all her problems and about how he might never forgive himself unless she shows that she has forgiven him first—or, maybe, that there is nothing for him to be forgiven for. She wants to move on, but she’ll never be able to as long as he is so stuck on her.

Despite what Mark says, she can’t just be done unless Grissom is done, too.

She needs a clean break. She needs to let go. She doesn’t want to be the person who gets shaken off her axis every time she has a conversation with her boss. Even now, hours later, in the full light of the afternoon, she is still stuck in those old memories, mired in them as if they were tar. She sits on her couch and rubs her temples.

“God.”

She decides she needs another vacation, this one purposeful, geared towards getting closure not just for herself but for Grissom. She needs to go back to California, to the place where they started. She requests eight days off, schedules a session with Mark on her first day away from the lab, and buys a plane ticket for her second. Her plan is to rent a car at the airport and drive up the coast from Big Sur to San Francisco. She only tells Grissom about the first leg in her journey.

Her intention is to tell Mark about the rest, at least in a roundabout way.

Normally, she wouldn’t even make the attempt, but she tried letting go alone by herself in the desert, and she wasn’t entirely successful. Now she requires a sounding board, someone who can assure her she is doing the right thing, and if that person can’t be anyone from work, then Mark is her only real option. At the very least, he’ll be frank with her, and that is what she needs.

Going into the appointment, she feels strangely resigned. Mark talks her through pleasantries and then asks, per usual, what she wants to discuss. Normally, she shrugs. Says she doesn’t know. Today.

“There’s this guy, and, uh, I’ve kinda been—” She can’t bring herself to say the words, but trusts her pause to speak for itself. “—for as long as I can remember.”

Even given the omission, she has never been so forthcoming with Mark about anything.

He takes her admission in stride, never breaking eye contact. “Is this the guy who cheated on you?”

She shakes her head. “No. He’s someone I’ve known for a long time, and we’ve been—I dunno. But nothing can, uh, ever really happen between us. I mean, it shouldn’t.”

“Is he married?”

She doesn’t directly answer Mark’s question, just glances away, allowing him to infer what he will. Married is perhaps a good approximation of the issue, an analog. She is no more able to have a relationship with Grissom as her boss than she would if he were married.

Mark considers this new information. Then, after a few seconds, he asks, “He’s one of the things that’s never really over? Just still there?”

She nods. “I don’t know why I keep hanging on when we can’t—when he won’t—”

Mark mulls for a long time before he speaks. “Tell me about him.”

“Pardon?”

“Tell me about him. What attracts you?”

Sara shifts in her chair. She knows she is getting awfully close to breaking her rules, if she hasn’t already broken them. She has to be careful proceeding. But she does want to proceed.

“Well, I mean, he’s brilliant. And he’s really, um, gentle with, uh, with people. He’s got a great sense of humor. He’s good-looking. I could listen to him talk for hours about anything really.”

She feels flustered now, hot in the cheeks. Ostensibly, what she’s told Mark is generic—the kinds of things that any woman might say about the man she was infatuated with. But somehow just speaking the words aloud seems like an intensely intimate act, like if Mark were to somehow know Grissom or know of him, he might be able to guess whom she was talking about.

“Has he ever said he would leave his wife for you?”

Sara shakes her head no, and, technically, it isn’t a lie—especially when she considers here what _wife_ might be equivalent to. Grissom hasn’t ever intimated that he would be willing to give something up for them to be together. Just the opposite, in fact, if she thinks back on what she overheard him tell Dr. Lurie, that surgeon who killed Debbie Marlin.

Mark follows up. “So is it fair to say you make yourself available to him, but he doesn’t reciprocate?”

Sara can’t look at Mark now. She can only focus on her knuckles curling over the armrest on her chair and the colored flecks in the commercial carpet at her feet. Helpless, she shrugs.

She tries to ease her discomfort with a joke. “I should probably be asking myself why I’m such a sucker, huh?”

Mark shakes his head. “Not necessarily. You might do better asking yourself what you’re afraid of.” She looks up at him, surprised, and he explains. “You say this has been going on for how many years?”

“Six.”

“Okay, so for six years, you’ve been in this kind of—from what you’re describing—limbo with this married guy, where you maybe want to be with him, but he won’t be with you. There are things that you want from him that you’re not getting, but you’re still sticking around, which means that obviously there is some need he’s filling for you, some reason you keep coming back to him, even if it’s not the complete package. Have you ever considered that maybe you’re afraid of having the kind of relationship where you could fully be with someone, so you’ve chosen this guy that has a permanent barrier in place? His unavailability is a safety net for you because it prevents you from having to disclose.”

Sara frowns. She doesn’t want to think about the assertion too much. She tries to deflect. “You got all that from what I’ve told you just now?”

Mark shakes his head. “No. I’m making an educated guess. Sara, let me be really frank with you: This is your fourth session with me, and you’ve barely told me anything about you. There is obviously some sore spot you’re trying to protect. We circle around it, but you keep it to yourself, probably because you don’t want anyone to poke at it and make it hurt. I’m guessing it’s that way not just with me but with everyone in your life. Friends. Coworkers. The guys you date. Nobody ever gets to know what’s underneath. So whatever is going on with this guy, it’s not really about him. It’s about that thing you’re trying to keep safe.”

In years past, Sara would have argued against such a strong assertion. She would have gotten defensive. Mean, even. But now, she is just so tired. The sore spot inside her throbs.

“So what do I do?”

Her voice is small.

Mark adjusts his glasses. His tone is without judgment. “Well, statistically speaking, if this guy didn’t leave his wife for you within the first year, he’s not going to ever leave her, so you need to decide how you want to proceed there—if it’s worth it for you to keep holding on to him, knowing that he most likely won’t ever change.” He shrugs. “As for the other stuff, that’s something you’ve got to own up to for yourself. You’ve got to decide if you’re going to keep carrying it around.”

Though in reality the conversation has taken place over fifteen minutes, Sara feels as if everything has happened in a rush, like a dam has burst, and now millions of gallons of sharp, heavy water are bowling her over in a torrent. Her instinct is to stop the discussion, but she also has a sense that she may never get another chance to be honest about these issues again. Out in the desert, she realized that she does want to change.

She reaches inside herself, but.

“I—I can’t talk about it.”

The admission causes a physical pain in her ribs. She wants to open up, to tell the whole story. In her childhood and adolescence, she never had a choice. The shrink would have access to her file and know her whole history before she ever set foot in his office. She would have to talk about her experiences whether she wanted to or not. Now she does have a choice, and the desire is there, but that same wall remains, strong and solid, inside her. If she tried to say the words, her tongue would break. She would sob and sob and maybe never breathe again.

Mark seems to recognize how she is struggling. He is kind. “So don’t talk about it. Not now,” he says. “Think about it. Write about it. Draw pictures of it. Work up to the talking. It’ll hurt, poking around, but you’ve gotta do something. Are you happy this way?”

Tears prick hot at her eyes.

“No.”

“When is the last time you were happy?”

She wants to say San Francisco, those first days with Grissom, but maybe not even then. It’s hard to tell now with all the history piled on top of those memories, inflecting them, changing them. Maybe she has never known what happiness is, not the way that other people do.

“Don’t answer me,” Mark instructs her. “Just think. All of this—the drinking, the married guy, being too focused on work—it’s all about you looking for validation in places where you can’t actually get it. You keep looking for this next thing that’s gonna suddenly make you happy, but you sabotage yourself, picking options that will inevitably let you down. To me, that behavior says that maybe you don’t believe that you deserve to be happy—that you don’t think you can be—even though you want to. It all goes back to the secret you’re keeping. You’ve gotta do some work on what’s in your past before you can move forward.”

Her throat is tight. “Can I try the, uh, ritualizing closure thing?”

“Sure. Try it, come back, and maybe at your next appointment, we’ll be able to talk.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

Driving home, she feels excoriated, like her insides are raw and hurt. Mark put an idea in her head, one she already hates but knows, in an implicit, inarguable way, that she’ll have to carry out—one that might be her saving grace. At traffic lights, she tries to talk herself down and out, but by the time she is walking through her front door, she knows.

She has to go to Tomales Bay to see the B&B, if it’s even still standing.

That’s the hurt spot she keeps protecting.

Of course, she’ll have to build up the nerve to drag her ass there, the same way she does with therapy. She’ll make the stop the addendum to the travel plans she already has: first she’ll go to Big Sur, then San Francisco, and then Tomales Bay. On her way up the coast, she’ll work on achieving closure with Grissom. In Tomales Bay, she’ll try to achieve closure with everything else.

She can’t think about the last stop too much in advance. Not yet. Not now. Trying to picture herself standing on the blue, glowing shore, she seizes up. Shakes.

So she sticks to the present, to what she might do to tie things up with Grissom. The problem, she thinks, is that he is still clinging to the _someday_ , and she needs him to move away from the idea, the same way she’s been meaning to. They have to just be friends—and he has to know, for certain, that that’s how she thinks of him now. Her job is to convince him that she’s all right and that she has released him from whatever expectations she once held. His job is to stop blaming himself for leading her on, because she is not allowing herself to be led anymore.

Theirs will never be a clean break, but maybe they can have clean healing.

She can’t say the words to his face, but there are other ways to communicate.

Over the last few years, they’ve gotten good at those.

She thinks about him during the airplane ride, touching down in Fresno, renting the car, driving out along the 152 W to the coast. Big Sur is, as he promised, beautiful, a word which always pricks at the invisible seam that runs down her chest when she thinks it in association with him. In contrast to the ochres and reds of the Nevada Mojave, the California seaside is astoundingly green, cleft with sheer crags and run up along waves that match the sky, blue to blue, with hardly a break in-between.

For hours, she mostly drives. On the few occasions when she stops for fuel or food, she finds herself disparate from the crowds of other tourists, as isolated as if she were a prisoner locked away in a tower. She carries her secret like a bruise beneath her clothing that no one else knows exists—like her mother’s bruises, as she remembers them from her childhood.

At a service station, a stranger smiles and holds the door for her, and she feels as if her face will crack and fall to pieces when she tries to return the look. At a diner, a waitress asks her what brings her into town, and she stills like a rabbit caught in a hunter’s crosshairs in the second before the blast. The real answer is that she has come to bury things.

“Sightseeing,” is what she says.

The longer she remains in Big Sur, the more she feels that if she doesn’t act soon, she won’t act at all. She hasn’t allowed herself to think of the B&B in any direct way, but she has slipped into thinking about why she’s not thinking about it, about her moratorium itself. Those thoughts are heavy, like a lead blanket, and the farther north she drives, the more they weigh her down.

Of course, she can’t do anything about those issues yet, not when she is still so far from her physical destination and not when she still feels so weak and woozy about everything. She isn’t up to the effort. She needs the two-hundred miles between where she is and where she’s going. She needs to get a hold of herself.

To breathe.

That means she has just one resort, her usual coping mechanism: solving another, smaller problem, something she actually has control over in the moment.

It’s a desperate, day-late and dollar-short alternative and something she has done a thousand times before. In a way, it’s how she lives her life: never able to solve the problems she actually needs to, always focusing on stopgap measures, more manageable but less impactful. Mark would probably point out the correlation between her family history and the fact that, as an adult, she has become a crime scene investigator. She can’t solve her own problem, so she solves everyone else’s.

It’s basic Displacement 101.

Still. She can’t deny that she isn’t ready to deal with Tomales Bay yet, and she won’t be ready until she arrives. She also can’t deny that she has more problems than just that one, vast and deep as it may be. There’s still the Grissom of it all. Who knows if she’ll ever be able to stop feeling for him the way that she has always felt, but maybe she can help him move on from her, and maybe it will be enough.

So in a bookstore along Highway 1, she purchases for Grissom what he will recognize as a gift for his birthday but which she knows as something else—a parting gift, not for a physical goodbye but for a concession, a giving way, a changing of the colors.

They’ve always given each other birthday gifts, ever since that first year in San Francisco, and the gifts have always been too much—nothing ostentatious or overly expensive but somehow perpetually too thoughtful, too careful, too measured, the kinds of things that acknowledge, in a profounder way than language, the delicacy of their situation, the unfulfilled wanting, the foolish, quiet hope.

The gifts carry with them the unspoken implication: _I pay attention to you._ Not just any attention, but a special absorbed kind, like how a mariner would mark the stars, knowing where they are and where they should be, noting each small rotation and orbit, every quarter tick of the celestial spheres. The gifts bring heat to the cap of her head and brightness to her cheeks, both as giver and receiver, because they are an admission: _I care, I care, I care._

She doesn’t want to take the gifts altogether away from Grissom. She doesn’t want to stop noticing him or being that person who finds him when he’s lost. She just also wants to do right by herself, to send him a message that though she has his back and she’ll always pay attention—always care—she is finally all right, and he doesn’t need to regret her in the same shamefaced way that he has been regretting her all these years. She wants to release him and really mean it. She wants him to know they’re even.

That’s one thing she can maybe do, even though she can do nothing else.

She purchases an antique book: essays by Coleridge, a favorite poet of his, about Shakespeare, a favorite author. She takes the thing with her back on the road and stops about twenty minutes later at a scenic overpass, looking out on the ocean. On the hood of her rental car, she sits. She sighs. She finally writes him her letter.

The words come to her with surprising ease. She writes to him the way they used to talk in San Francisco, frankly and with a sense of humor, with the freedom to say anything in need of saying. At first, she responds to some of what he wrote to her in his letter about Dostoevsky. She talks about getting older, about nature, about noticing what is beautiful and what is innately right. Her words soon wrap on top of themselves, and she finds exactly the thing she means to say—what she maybe should have been saying all along.

She tells him that she hopes he gets everything he needs, and then she thanks him—for the job, though she thinks he’ll know she’s implying more.

Even with the way that everything has turned out, Grissom has been good for her, she thinks, because, of everyone who has ever been a part of her life, he has been the one person who has really given a damn, and that’s something that she’s needed.

She wants him to know.

For a long time after she recaps her pen, she sits on her car and watches the ceaseless repetitions of the waves breaking in whitecaps against the rock coast. She’ll give him the book with the letter inside on the day she returns to work—his forty-eighth birthday—and isn’t that a good turning point, an organic marker for a change? Homecoming, transformation, and resolution, all in one.

Momentarily, she feels at peace with what she has done.

But as the sun begins to set over the horizon, staining the clouds champagne hues and burnishing the ocean to a sheet of blown glass, she knows that she has more work to do. Returning to Las Vegas won’t be a fresh start if she doesn’t accomplish the rest of what she came to California for. She has more work waiting for her up the coast, more rituals to complete.

She decides not to stay in Big Sur but to continue on to San Francisco.

There is a pit in her stomach, part acid and part steel.

When she reaches the city, she checks into a hotel several miles north of her own old neighborhood in the Mission District. Though maybe she should, she doesn’t call any of her former coworkers from the SFPD or even her once-roommate to let them know she is in town. The truth is that she wouldn’t know how to explain her purpose in coming here to them. She couldn’t have quick, light reunions and still continue on to the heavy thing she has waiting ahead. She wants to see the city and to remember, but she also needs to control her intake. Now isn’t the time for happening on elements from her former life or stumbling down rabbit holes in her memories. She has to know where she’s going. She has to be ready to move on. The city is just a stopover, a place to ready and to stoke.

She spends four days there, which is almost enough time for her to develop a routine. Every morning, she rises early before dawn and heads out for coffee under cover of dark and fog. Afternoons, she spends wandering, sightseeing at museums and small shops, riding the cable cars like a tourist. Nights, she stays out too late—though only once at a bar. Mostly, she sits at a bench on the pier at South Beach, overlooking the little yachts packed in tight rows beneath the harbor lights. The acid and steel feeling in her belly intensifies as her stay nears its inevitable end.

Her last day in San Francisco is a blur, like a film montage or waking dream. Though she hasn’t allowed herself to return to any of her specific haunts, there is still enough familiar in the city that she suddenly feels spun with déjà vu. Now everywhere seems like somewhere where she has investigated a murder before or else like someplace where she and Grissom used to walk. She convinces herself she knows people she almost certainly has never met. She realizes it’s all anticipatory to where she intends to go tomorrow, to what she intends to do.

She had told herself that she would be ready for Tomales Bay, but the truth is that she isn’t sure. She could choose not to go, she knows, because she never told Mark or anyone else that she meant to. Her obligation is only to herself.

But that’s just the thing, isn’t it?

Her obligation is to herself, so she has to go, whether she’s ready or not.  

She has put it off for far too long already.

Night falls, and she doesn’t go out to the beach or anywhere else. She sits cross-legged on the balcony of her hotel room, drinking import beers from the minibar, feeling like a college kid on spring break. A breeze carries in from the harbor and lifts her hair from her shoulders, and she thinks _,_ _This is it. Twenty-four years._

Her cellphone sits on the ground beside her, and she tries to convince herself that maybe she is drunk enough to call Grissom and tell him what she means to do tomorrow, just so she can have some accountability to someone. But she isn’t drunk, and she couldn’t tell him, and she shouldn’t even want to call him, she knows, she knows, she knows.

When she checks out of the hotel in the morning, she feels strangely calm, like she isn’t about to return to the B&B for the first time since she left the place as a child. The concierge behind the desk asks her if she’d be willing to rate her stay, and when she says that it was excellent, she is surprised to realize that she isn’t lying. Smiling is also weirdly easy. Everything inside her is still like water in a standing bowl.

The drive from San Francisco to Tomales Bay takes about two hours, transporting her from urban hill country into farmland and forests. The main road on her route—Shoreline Highway—is scenic and narrow, sometimes smattered with cyclists in packs but otherwise sparse on traffic. Though she expects the fog from the city to eventually give way into blue skies, it never does lift. The day remains an even gray, the atmosphere looming low to the earth as if it were a blanket, settling down into the green canopies of the trees and intermittent ocean inlets, covering the fishing shacks and mom & pop shops she passes, seeming somehow almost kind.

If she is honest with herself, Sara has to admit that she doesn’t really recognize anything. She should know something, she thinks, but she doesn’t. She isn’t even sure how close she’s getting. If she is almost there or not. She tries to gauge herself, how she is feeling, but she can’t make her mind hold tight to the question. Everything is on autopilot now. She’s going whether she wants to or not.

Eventually, she comes up on an unincorporated town, and she starts to feel as if maybe she has driven on for too long, but the thought barely registers before suddenly she’s seeing signs for Bivalve, and the land is opening up, and then there’s water flanking the highway, and it’s the bay—she knows for certain, as if it were her name.

She drives for maybe twenty minutes more, and she keeps waiting to see something familiar enough to stop her, but so far the only thing tripping her memories is the water, the way the wind daubs white divots on the surface of the bay like a painter applying gouache to canvas.

Every time she passes another vehicle on the road, the thought comes her that maybe it’s someone she used to know—a kid she went to school with, all grown up, still living in the same place. Statistically, that’s how it tends to go in small towns. Most people don’t leave. Don’t ever have a reason to leave, the way she did. There were only about seventy students in total enrolled at her elementary school. Only twelve kids in her third grade class. Chances are, most of them are still around, running the same businesses their parents used to run, renting kayaks to tourists, shucking oysters, doing hard ag labor at the dairy creamery. They probably all married each other. They probably all have kids of their own. Even if they didn’t remember her face, they would remember her family’s headline. At one time, it was the worst thing to have ever happened in Marin County.

Her grip on the steering wheel tightens, and soon she sees the sign.

MARSHALL  
POP 50, ELEV 15.

The last time this sign was in her view, she was looking through the rear window of 1978 Country Squire at four o’clock in the morning. Just a few miles back, the darkness had subsumed the red and blue lights flashing over the B&B. Still, the afterimage burned her retinas. The social worker driving the car hadn’t noticed that she never buckled in—had probably wanted to convey her away from the violence as quickly as possible. Her knees sat folded beneath her as she propped herself up, facing backward over the seat, watching the darkness swallow the town and its harbors forever.

Even back then, as a child, she had already understood the severity of what had happened. Before the first responders arrived, she had gone into the master bedroom and seen her father lying there, eyes glassy and open through the pitch, a smell in the air, iron and wet. The scene was final, still, sick.

So much of the night was familiar: the pounding up the stairs, the screaming, the lights pouring in through the crack under her door. But her father carved up in the bed was new, and the coroner’s van in the front yard was new. Having both parents taken away, one under a sheet, the other in handcuffs, ravening, was terrible and new. The five police cruisers not just from the Sheriff’s Office but from the Twin Cities Police Authority in Larkspur, thirty miles away, new. The social worker, promising that she would be safe now. The way her house didn’t feel like her house anymore. New, new, new.

Through the open driver’s side window of her rental, she catches a whiff of bay air—earthy and saline, like the inside of an oyster shell. She starts to think about how she has never visited the cemetery where her father’s remains lay.

All of a sudden.

Her stomach clenches, acid overcoming steel. On instinct, she veers onto the shoulder, hard. One motion: shifting the car into park, unclicking her seatbelt, throwing open her door. Bile rises in her throat, a torrent, and she stumbles onto the gravel to retch, one hand on the car, the other curled over her belly.

The vomit is already in her mouth by the time she can bend forward. She struggles to breathe through her nose. Heat seethes across her skin, and tears prick her eyes. A heave, and her stomach contents spatter the ground.

Even with her mouth and throat clear, she still can’t force herself to draw in air. Her diaphragm rollicks under her lungs. She can’t breathe, she can’t breathe, she can’t breathe.

Momentarily, she wonders if she will pass out. She holds tight to the car, dizzy and frantic, her surroundings spinning as if in centrifuge. The tears that sprang to her eyes as she vomited now threaten to spill hot down her face. She struggles for a breath but gasps out instead. She struggles again. Her thoughts thin.

Only through sheer willpower can she force herself to capture a first breath. It hits her lungs like a bullet, once, twice, and then all at once she’s hyperventilating, breathing too fast, though before she couldn’t breathe at all.

Through another force of will, she plants herself back in the driver’s seat of the rental car, facing out the open door, and drops her head between her knees. The physical act of bending down slows her respiration some. One breath. Two. Three. Then. A sob breaks over her like a wave. The first cry is animal and voiced, but then the next cries are silent. She clutches her face in her hands, and her skin sears as with fire. Shudders wrack her body. She can’t stop.

In her mind, she is in her parents’ bedroom, and the lights are out, but she can still see dark spots on the walls above the bed.

Now she is unaware of anything happening outside herself. Inside, there’s an air raid siren. Inside, there’s a hurricane. There’s physical sickness and the sensation of dying, of everything in her on nails and on ledges, of her thinking _Jesus Christ_ and begging for someone to pull her away. She makes no sound, no keening, but tears blister her face, and she shakes and cringes, shakes and hurts.

Maybe ten minutes elapse before she becomes vaguely aware that vehicles have been passing her, perhaps with passengers wondering what the hell she is doing, doubled-over and half-hanging from her car on the side of the road.

Still, she can’t move.

She remains.

She doesn’t know how much time goes by until she finally stops crying, suddenly, as if someone had turned down a switch. She doesn’t know what makes her stop.

Her first salient thought since she stopped the car is that she’s not going any farther north—that she can’t, or she’ll actually fucking die.

She wipes her face furiously on the sleeve of her jacket.

“Damn it,” she says. “God dammit.”

She had never intended to stay on Tomales Bay—just to be there for an hour or two, long enough to perform whatever ritual came to mind, to get her peace, to do what was necessary. She had always imagined she’d go back to San Francisco for the night, then drive to Fresno the next day, ready for her return flight home. She hadn’t been so stupid as to expect she would return to Las Vegas triumphant, but she also hadn’t anticipated that she would wreck herself this badly.

It’s been years since she has had a panic attack that has so thoroughly kicked her ass.

She moves her feet back in the car and closes the door after herself. Her ribcage is still quaking, so she folds herself into a tight embrace. Her cellphone sits in the cup-holder on the console, and she wonders if maybe she should call someone, but then she doesn’t know who she could call besides an ambulance, and she doesn’t want to do that—because even the thought of an ambulance here on the bay is enough to clench her stomach again.

Fuck, she’ll be sick.

The engine is still on, so she pushes the button to roll up her window and flips the A/C to max. Even as the cool air hits her, she swelters, burning as with fever. She tries not to register the smell from the water that still lingers inside the car, even with the door and window closed. She tries not to think of the last time she was in Marshall. On Tomales Bay. She isn’t ready. Fuck her for thinking that she was. Fuck Mark for making her want to try. Fuck this town. Fuck her parents. Fuck her life. Fuck everything.

She slams her hand on the steering wheel, and the horn bleats. It’s a stupid, synthetic sound, disproportionate to the organic chaos inside her.

She seethes through her teeth and remains, still and unable to move for a long while.

God knows how long passes before the hollow sets in, the adrenaline ebbing out like the tide, leaving her with nothing but an even, unaccented exhaustion. Now her energy is spent, and her body aches to lie down, her mind to sleep a dreamless, nothing sleep. It’s the same way she feels after triple shifts. The same way she feels after losing a court case despite months of prep. Her shoulders slump, but she knows she can’t rest here.

One more time, she tries to rally, to convince herself that maybe she should just drive those few more miles to where she needs to go. If she just muscled through, maybe she would be able to do it, and all the effort would count for something.

But she knows she can’t.

There’s not just one wall inside her but four walls surrounding her, closing closer each second she remains here, like some rigged room in a spy movie. They’re shrinking in on every side, crushing her ribs, and soon she won’t be able to breathe again. She’ll be compressed down to dust. So she has to leave. She can no more drive to the B&B than she could shoot down the sun from the sky. She can’t go back. She never could.

By now, scent from the bay has cleared from the car. Now, instead, she smells iron in her memories.

Her stomach jumps, and if she had anything more to lose, she would puke right then.

It takes her ten more minutes before she shifts the car back into drive, then blearily, clumsily, performs a five-point turn to get back on Shoreline Highway, going away from the town. She feels like she’s taken a sharp blow to the head. Everything in her skull rings, and every thought she has is blank. Somehow, with only a perfunctory consciousness of herself, she brings the car to cruising speed, settling into her lane, driving keenly and smoothly south.

Later, she won’t remember the two hours between the bay and San Francisco. She won’t remember bypassing the city and ending up in San Jose. She won’t remember anything except that she failed. The hotel that night, the drive to Fresno, the trek through the airport—it’s all sludge in her memories, sick like decomp, boiled down to nothing. There’s only just one impression, and it’s her self-loathing. It’s the thought that she needed to do one thing for herself, that she needed to save her own life, and she couldn’t manage. She touches down at McCarran with her head in her hands.

Fuck her for ever thinking there was anything better than this.

She expects that her experience in California will ruin her for a few weeks at least—that smiling, making conversation, and hiding her hurt will become the most difficult things in the world. But the truth is that she has had years of practice at pretending she is fine even when she isn’t, and she has tricks for making herself perform at least at a mechanical level.

She makes a rule for herself: While she is at work, she can’t think about what happened. Off the clock, she can rage. Off the clock, she can ache. She can keel over and lie in bed, debilitated, sobbing, if she needs to. But during her shift, she has to do her job and interact with her coworkers like nothing is wrong. She has to maintain a façade.

Someone who didn’t know any better might praise her strength and fortitude, but she is aware: what she is doing is just another form of repression, one more maladaptive behavior leftover from childhood. The reason she isn’t mourning what happened is because if she starts, she’ll never stop, and she can’t risk never stopping. She has always handled her disappointments this way, swallowing them down like bitter poison, then ignoring that they’re in her system just as long and as hard as she can, until her inevitable collapse.

Now the only question is how long she can keep running until she breaks.

Going back to work, she feels uneasy, like she is carrying a stack of porcelain plates that she could drop and shatter at any moment. Driving down Bonanza, she checks her face in the rearview mirror: her expression is even, still as glass; her eyes don’t even look too sad. For now, she is adhering to her rule.

Her first greeting in the lab comes from Greg, who flags her down at reception. He wears his brightest grin and stands tall, looking somehow proud of himself.

“What are you so happy about?” she asks.

He seems almost bouncy. Effervescent. “Can’t I just be happy to see you?”

“Not that happy.”

Greg smirks. “Grissom pulled me in on a federal case. We’ve been working with the DEA on a big cocaine bust. Maybe you saw it on the news?”

She shakes her head. Watching TV hasn’t been a priority for her since she returned to Vegas. She’s just glad that Greg seems more interested in talking up his case than asking her about her trip. “Look at you, Mr. Soon-to-be-Level-I,” she says, fanning his ego to keep the conversation going. “What’s he had you doing? Chasing perps down the Strip with Brass? Big Code 3 with guns out?”

“Inventorying the contraband.” He deflates a little. “It’s mostly just been stuff here in the lab.”

“That still counts as fieldwork.”

“Well, I have you to thank for it. Grissom only put me on the case because you were out of town. You would have been his first choice, if you weren’t on vacation.”

Greg’s observation is probably true, and he undoubtedly means it in a benign way, but Sara still flinches. Whenever her coworkers remark on the particulars of her and Grissom’s working relationship, she feels uncomfortable and exposed. She sidesteps Greg’s intended compliment.

“Are there any other active cases?”

“Nick’s got a murder in Northtown.”

“Good to know.”

Here, they reach the DNA lab, and Greg gives Sara a low wave, allowing her to continue on without him. She feels like she has leapt one hurdle, talking to someone—though, admittedly, Greg is the easiest option. Making conversation with Catherine, Warrick, and Nick requires a different kind of finesse, and Grissom—

Well.

Seeing Grissom again feels like something happening in some other life than hers. He appears in the doorway while she is in the locker room, backlit from the hall. He holds his hands low at his side, turned out, the way he sometimes does when he doesn’t know how to present himself. They exchange greetings. Then.

“Greg said you guys have had suits in here all week.”

Grissom seems unprepared for the assertion, like he hadn’t realized time was passing while he and Sara stood facing each other. “Yeah,” he stumbles, “the DEA.”

She wants to keep things light, the same way she did with Greg. “I bet that’s been fun,” she deadpans.

“It’s, uh, ongoing.”

He enters the room, going to his locker, across from hers. For a second, his back is to her, and she thinks maybe he won’t know how to ask her anything else, so the conversation will be over. But he gathers himself.

“How did Big Sur agree with you?”

She expected this question would affront her more—be almost unanswerable—but now the only thing she finds difficult about responding is looking him in the face. Before she left for California, Grissom had seemed heartsick over her every time they shared space. Now something is different, and she is not sure how to account for the change. The desperation in his eyes is of a new strain, and she intuits that it has more to do with what’s inside of him than whatever he thinks is inside of her. She tries to convince herself that maybe he just missed her, but she already knows it’s more than that.

His eyes are so blue, like the ocean beneath the cliffs.

“Oh, uh, well. Yeah, I liked it,” she stammers, and she is surprised to realize she is telling the truth. She did like Big Sur, just not what came afterwards. “The views, they’re—I mean, like you said—fantastic, and the driving’s great all the way up the coast. The only thing was the whole place was so crowded.”

She has given him a travelogue, but Grissom nods like she has said something wise and important.

“August in a tourist area.”

“Yeah, I couldn’t get a hotel, so I, uh, ended up just passing through.” She makes the admission before she can stop herself.

“Where did you go?”

“San Francisco.”

It is a bigger revelation than what she intended, but she knows it will be the last one. She won’t tell him about Tomales Bay, no matter how he looks at her, and never mind how blue his eyes. San Francisco is enough, exposing in the same sort of way as Greg’s quip about her being Grissom’s first choice to work the drug case. She offers what she hopes is a smile, but considering how shy she feels, she knows it probably comes out lopsided. Just saying that she was in San Francisco smacks of breaking their old rule, like talking about something they’ve both agreed to forget.

She doesn’t know how he’ll react: if he’ll get skittish, as he is prone to when things turn too personal between them, or if he’ll play it off, like nothing.

“How was it?” he asks, and, to her surprise, he sounds reverent—like she has already given him a gift, even though she hasn’t yet.

“It was—” He is looking at her too desperately now, like he needs her to say some specific thing, or he won’t be able to breathe. Maintaining eye contact is difficult. “It was nice. Strange, kind of. I hadn’t really been back since I moved.” She’s being honest, the same way she was as she wrote him the letter that he doesn’t even know exists yet. She reaches for something to say that will prove she’s all right. For the thing that he seems to need to hear. “I went to the Asian Art Museum.”

That was a date they’d had planned during the San Francisco days. They never ended up going. Now she can’t remember why. She hopes he takes it as a sign: If she can make casual conversation about the place, the missed date, she must be okay. It must not be difficult for her to think of their past anymore. She tries to keep her voice warm and light.

He looks at her deeply, and she can’t tell if she has said the exact wrong thing or the exact right one.

Then.

“So you just drove straight through Big Sur?”

“No, I stopped.” It’s a natural segue into the birthday gift. “Actually—” She takes the book from her open locker and passes it into his hands. “I hope this is—hope it’s—” She doesn’t want to startle him, considering how fragile he seems. “It’s just we always, um—”

She doesn’t think she has to remind him that they always give each other birthday gifts, considering that they even did so the last two years, when she was dating Hank, and everything was so confused. He looks down at the book. Despite the newspaper wrappings, the nature of the gift is obvious. His eyes brighten with recognition, now blue like the tail of a daytime comet.

“Of course,” he says. “Should I open it now, or—?”

Maybe she should tell him to wait until he is at home, in case he finds the letter right away. But she doesn’t. She needs to see for herself how he reacts to the book, to use his response as a gauge. She still isn’t certain just how deep this new neediness in him runs. Watching him will tell her how she should proceed.

“Sure. I mean, if you want to.”

He peels back the newspaper from the book, then stills as if he has been struck by lightning. He looks to her, his mouth open but without words to speak. His silence brings heat to the cap of her head and brightness to her cheeks. She has to tamp it down.

“It’s the first complete collection of his essays,” she says, shifting. “It’s just that you were reading _Hamlet_ a while back, and I know you like Coleridge, so I thought maybe—I mean, it’s not his poetry, but—well, I stopped at this bookstore in Big Sur, and it seemed pretty good, so, uh—” She doesn’t mean to babble, but he is staring at her more desperately than ever now. “Happy birthday.”

She can already tell that, more than the book, what she has said is the gift. Grissom was hanging on her every word, needing her to notice him, and she did notice him. He was holding his breath for her, and now that she has reached out to him, he can breathe. He visibly exhales, and the seam in her chest torques because, in one way, this reaction justifies everything she tried to do in California, proving to her that she was right about Grissom, but, in another, it complicates everything.

Here is the truth: She will have to be so careful going forward, in trying to get them the closure they both need. She is going to have to be the strong one, and she doesn’t know if she is strong. Having him so close to her makes her bones turn to milk.

“Thank you,” he says, thumbing the book cover. “It’s lovely.”

He’s only barely talking about Coleridge, and she can barely stand it. The way he’s looking at her—

She isn’t his foxhole prayer anymore.

She is his miracle.

“I’m glad you like it,” she says, flustered. “You haven’t read it, have you?”

“No, no, it’s—”

He doesn’t get the chance to say the word before Warrick appears, telling him that the feds want a check-in on the drug case.

“Ongoing fun times,” Sara tells him. “You want me to—?”

“No need to ruin your first day back. You go with Nick.”

—and maybe that’s for the best, because Sara’s heart might actually beat out of her chest.

She isn’t over Grissom. She knew she wasn’t, even after burning his letter in the desert, even after her time spent in San Francisco. Everything she has ever felt for him is still there, brighter and closer to the surface than she would like it to be. But at least she knows she can still help him, even feeling the way she does. She was brave for him today, and he needed that. Maybe she can’t save her own life, but she can save his.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to get closure for them both, to tone this warm, hopeful affection between them into something more manageable. She doesn’t necessarily want Grissom seeing her as something beatific in the long run. She wants what she was feigning to become real, and for him to feel it, too. But as a first step, assuring him that she is in a position to give and to be gracious is passable. She only hopes that her letter will continue the work for her once he reads it.

The partnership with Nick is in a way a grace.

Nick is too competitive to notice that there is anything wrong with her and too focused on the case to really ask her questions. They spend their time in the field together trying to one-up each other’s observations, and they never broach any personal topics. It’s all flak and punchlines, pickups and revelations. If Nick has any idea how knotted up she is inside, he makes no indication. She’s glad for the inattention.

Going home in the morning is something else.

It’s like aging ten years all at once. Lying in her bed, she feels old and unspeakably faraway from everything, like she is her own echo across a chasm. She doesn’t allow herself to remember anything that could potentially set her off, nothing from her trip and nothing from her childhood. Those memories are like old boxes, packed away tight in a locked attic, and she has no intention to dig out the key. Instead, she is angry in a displaced way. As she goes about her day, she finds herself picking apart napkins on her countertop, closing doors a bit too hard behind her. Even watching television, her hands ball into fists that have nothing to do with the images on screen.

The next shift follows the same pattern. She goes to work, performs her tasks with surprising aplomb, and then wrecks as soon as she gets back to her apartment, crashing hard against the walls inside her. Putting off the anger so that she can do her job only intensifies the feeling once she is at home. There is a clamp around her heart that closes every time she thinks about the course of her life—about how she spent her childhood being lied to and passed around like an unpayable debt, about her parents and how they couldn’t or wouldn’t improve themselves for her, how their love was faulty and weak and conditional, and they failed and now she is failing, always, perpetuating their same mistakes, unable to do anything different. She spends her hours away from the lab furious and incapable of sleep. She drinks to take the edge off but then regrets her choice as her thoughts become more liquid and harder to control.

The longer she remains in Vegas, the more she becomes aware of the doubling, of the fact that she is displacing so much that she has almost become two people: the Sara at work, who is fine and functional, and the Sara at home, who is a seething, catastrophic mess. She doesn’t know why she can’t just be the first Sara all the time—to shut off her other self and her trauma entirely. The fact that she can’t makes her feel like she is chewing stones, like there is gravel in her belly.

Thursday night, she shows up for shift to find Greg leaving the lab at the same time that she is arriving. He looks dead on his feet, like he has been on all day. She knows that he has been working the federal drug case, and she wonders if maybe he pulled a double to help wrap it.

“Hey, you catch the bad guys yet?” she teases, slipping easily into her work role.

Greg sits on the locker room bench, barely moving. “Very funny,” he says. His tone shuts down her playfulness. He clearly isn’t in the mood.

It isn’t like Greg to be so sullen. “What happened?” she asks.

Greg heaves a sigh. “I screwed up.”

“How?”

“Grissom had me inventorying all the drugs that they seized from the warehouse downtown, and I must’ve measured something wrong. My log is off for one of the baggies, just like two grams, but two grams is a lot when we’re talking about cocaine. Now Agent Kaeplan wants an IAB investigation, and Cavallo is pissed at Grissom for letting me work the case when I’m not certified yet. I can't explain what happened. I did everything the way Warrick showed me. I swear to God, though, I didn’t take any of the drugs.”

“I would never think that you did.”

Greg scoffs. “Well, Kaeplan does. Cavallo and Ecklie, too.”

“Why is Ecklie involved?”

“Cavallo assigned dayshift to back us up.”

Greg looks stricken now, but he isn’t overreacting. The situation is serious, and Sara can’t lie to say that it is not. As someone who has worked in law enforcement for nearly ten years now, she has a good idea of what will go down if the missing drugs aren’t recovered soon. Since Greg is the rookie, he will be made the department scapegoat, regardless of whether or not he is actually at fault. As the new guy, he is vulnerable. Expendable, even. The only thing he has going for him is the fact that he has Grissom in his corner. Most supervisors would be willing to throw a trainee under the bus to shield themselves from fallout, but Sara has no doubt that Grissom will stand up for Greg.

“What’s Grissom saying?”

“Not much. I mean, he’s trying to figure out where those two grams went missing, and he told Cavallo and Kaeplan that he’s not going to take any actions until he has a better idea of what’s happening, but, uh—” Greg shrugs, helpless, and suddenly seems very young. His voice strains. “I think he’s mad at me.”

For as dejected as Greg sounds, Sara suspects that his take on Grissom is off. While Cavallo and Kaeplan are undoubtedly livid, Grissom doesn’t get angry about issues like this one. Abusers, yes. Bad admin, yes. Suspects lying to him and senseless injustices, yes and yes. But not honest, human mistakes—and especially not honest, human mistakes made by someone who is still learning. Maybe if Greg had been negligent or reckless, Grissom might be disappointed in him, but not when he was making his best effort to adhere to protocol.  

If Sara had to guess, she would say that Grissom is probably remaining aloof because he wants to keep Greg out of the crossfire between him and the administration. Unjustified anger just isn’t in his character. It’s actually one of his qualities that she finds most attractive.

Of course, she can’t say any of what she is thinking to Greg. She places a hand on his shoulder, giving a squeeze for reassurance. “Everything will get sorted out,” she promises.

“Thanks,” Greg says, though he doesn’t sound convinced.

Sara tries to get more information about the situation from Nick as they work their case. She plies him with questions as they take their meal halfway through shift.

“You heard about the thing with Greg?” she asks. Nick nods, grim. “I guess the lead agent is trying to bring IAB in. You were working that case. What’s your take on him?”  

“Kaeplan?” Nick scoffs. “Man, he and Grissom have been going at it all week.” He takes a break from his burger, moving on to his onion rings. “Wouldn’t be surprised if Grissom just flat decked him for gunning for Greg like this.”

Sara smirks. “You really think Grissom would deck somebody?”

Nick returns her expression, crow’s feet deepening around his eyes. “Sure. Under the right circumstances,” he says, but his tone isn’t serious. He shrugs. “I just think Grissom’s been stressed lately. Working too hard. He’s the one who needs a vacation.”

This assessment startles Sara. She hadn’t realized Grissom’s desperation went beyond his guilt concerning her, but, then again, she supposes that she hasn’t been around enough lately to know how Grissom is faring, one way or another. Nick makes it sound as if Grissom is in the same kind of shambles at work that she is in at home. Overtime is one thing; Grissom running himself into the ground is another.

Back at the lab, Sara waits for everyone else to leave before she seeks Grissom out herself. She finds him in the evidence locker with only the table light on. Bindles, electronic scales, photographs, and paperwork surround him in the dimness, making him the nexus heart of his own galaxy, tendril arms of his investigation spiraling around him in cosmos. This shift is at least the second consecutive one he has worked, if not the third. Somebody needs to save him from himself, and since nobody else is around, Sara supposes that the responsibility falls to her.

She tries to lead with support. “Hey. Nick and I wrapped our case. How’s the DEA mess?”

He winces. “If I can’t account for the two missing grams, they’re going to come after me for the customary pound of flesh.”

The Shakespeare reference isn’t unusual, but the helplessness in his voice is. He isn’t just tired or stressed. He is lost. She isn’t vain enough to believe that his aimlessness has only to do with her, and she also knows better than to ascribe it wholly to his tussling with the DEA. From her own experience, she is aware that sometimes things can bend and bend for years, until you think they’ll never break, but then suddenly they do.

She recalls that night back in June: the truck, the body dump, Grissom seeming so shy and fond half-shadowed in the passenger seat, telling her his teenage misadventures. Back then, she wondered if he wasn’t perhaps more lonely than she had ever realized. She thought that she should do something to reach him, to keep him company if she could, but then she got caught up in her own troubles. Being around him hurt her, so she withdrew.

She’s still struggling now—drowning, even—but not about him, not like she was. She’s in love, but more resigned to the futility. If she can help him move on, then maybe she’ll even be fully okay someday. Two months ago, she wasn’t able to give Grissom anything, but today she can. She can be kind to him in the way that he needs.

“That bad, huh? Is there anything I can do to help?” she offers, and the words in her mind mean one thing but from her tongue mean another.

She can’t be sure if Grissom catches the implication. He tries to smile at her, but his mouth is too tight and his eyes are too bleary. More than ever, he seems exhausted.

“No, thank you.”

Sara should maybe take his words as a dismissal, wish him goodnight, clean and quick, and leave him to his search. But now she thinks she understands a bit of how Grissom has felt, watching her flail these last few months. The look in his eyes could bruise her heart, and, regardless of everything else, she just wants him to feel better. He’ll never ask her anything, she knows, so she has to give to him freely.

“You should get some coffee,” she tells him, trying to sound soft and kind. “Don’t stay too late.”

It’s what a friend would say—what she would have said, before the lab explosion, before everything happened; during that first year, when whatever they had been in San Francisco was still warm to the touch in Vegas. She flips on the overhead lights for him to keep him from straining his eyes, then offers him one last smile and departs. It’s another very small step but something more than what she might have ventured even just a month ago, before she went to the desert.

The next week brings more of the same.

Grissom determines that the cocaine from the drug bust was never actually missing—something about a tie taken off the bag—then pulls Sara in as his partner on a vehicular homicide case involving a teenager who crashed a truck into a private home full of partying classmates. If Grissom feels at all relieved about the outcome of the DEA investigation, his relief certainly doesn’t show. Driving to the scene, he is subdued, almost plaintive. Every time Sara glances at him in the rearview, his expression seems tighter.

After too much silence, she pipes up, wanting to get him talking. “Greg thinks you’re mad at him.” The statement is useful in two ways: first, because it is true and something of which Grissom should be aware, and, second, because it will make Grissom curious enough to engage.

Sure enough, the tactic works. Grissom perks up in the passenger’s seat. “Mad at him?”

She clarifies. “He thinks you’ve been avoiding him.”

Her intention is to prompt Grissom to ask a follow-up question—something along the lines of _Well, where did Greg get that idea?_ —but Grissom doesn’t bite.

“Oh,” he says.

Silence again, Grissom seeming to retreat back into his own headspace. Sara wonders what he’s thinking, if he's maybe trying to answer the question about why Greg thinks he is angry for himself. She still wants him to talk.

“Well, are you mad at him?” she pushes.

Now Grissom seems startled. “No.”

“He thinks you’re never gonna let him do fieldwork again.”

Grissom considers this new information for a long moment. Then. “You and Greg talk a lot.” From anyone else, the phrasing would mark an accusation. From Grissom, only an observation, maybe one he has made before but never had the chance to present until now.

Sara knows that while she and Greg often banter at the lab, she doesn’t actually disclose to him above her other coworkers. But to Grissom, it must seem like they’re close—maybe more so than she is with Nick or with Warrick. She tries to be honest.

“I listen to him while he talks a lot.”

Though she means to be funny, in her peripheral vision, she sees Grissom give her a deep look. “You’re a good listener,” he says finally. “You’re able to intuit things, more than just what’s being said. I, uh, struggle with that. How are you—” He changes tacks, midsentence. “—how do you pick up on those things? Understand people in that way?”

By Grissom standards, he’s being almost effusive, and heat bursts over Sara’s skin in a reflexive, irresistible way. It’s been years since he has been so candid with her, so laudatory concerning her abilities. She feels like she did years ago at the ice rink or even before that in San Francisco. If Catherine or Nick or Warrick were eavesdropping on the conversation, they wouldn’t recognize anything romantic in Grissom’s praise, but Sara does.

Of course, she also recognizes that Grissom, though sweet, is wrong.

She isn’t by any means a good reader when it comes to people. Whatever small skill she has comes from long hours of practice; from paying attention in criminal psychology seminars; and from studying expression, tone, and gesture in the same way some people study musicology—by note and by rote, over and over again. Over the years, she has learned to pick up on things in the interrogation room, but in her personal relationships, her understanding still lacks. Because of how she was raised, she has a tendency to read annoyance and anger into conversations where they undoubtedly don’t exist. She feels as if she is always second-guessing people’s responses, not trusting that their smiles are smiles or that their laughter is friendly. There have been so many times when she has looked at someone who’s close to her and not had any idea what they were thinking.

Especially with Grissom.

So much of their trouble over the last four years has come about because she tends to misread him. God knows when she asked him out after the lab explosion, she fully expected that he would say yes. God knows last year, she couldn’t for the life of her understand why he was still cold to her even after she told him that she wanted them to go back to being professional, no harm, no foul. In some ways, she understands him well, but in other ways, he mystifies her.

“I don’t think I do,” she says. “I’m not one of those people who can just—I dunno— _level_. Not like Catherine or Warrick. I constantly misread people. But you—” She stops to check herself before she says something too forward. She always feels so transparent around him, like he can see through her, even when she’s trying to hide. It's not something that she should confess. “I mean, I think you’re better at it than you think you are.” Another thought comes to her, maybe overly earnest. She debates with herself, on the one hand, fearing to say too much, on the other, wanting to bolster him up if she can. His praise to her was also an insult to himself. He’s thinking he’s subhuman again, and she doesn’t want—well. “You’re honestly one of the best listeners I know.”

Here, she’s remembering San Francisco, those first nights spent walking through the fog, how he’d ask her the best questions, perspicacious and careful, and then listen to her responses as if they were poems he meant to memorize. Things she said in passing, he could recall to her months later. She had never had anyone learn her so thoroughly before. It’s part of why she fell so hard, a feature in the fairytale.

In the rearview, Grissom’s expression tightens again, and Sara understands: Something inside him reaches for the compliment but inevitably falls short. He can’t believe what she’s telling him, even though he wants to.

Other people might say differently, but speaking for herself, she wants him to know: “I always feel like you listen to me.”

Even when their relationship has been most strained, he has remained tuned to her frequency, noticing things about her that no one else does. She remembers just before she got pulled over. The team was still working the Coombs case. The victim was in with a sketch artist while Sara waited in the hall. After a few moments, Grissom stopped beside her. He suggested she should take some time off. Though she insisted she was fine, he already seemed to know, even then, that she wasn’t. She shut him down, of course. But he was right. He listened to the warbling, broken strain in her probably without fully understanding what it meant. There are times when she swears he picks up on things she’s never told anyone.

“I try to,” he says, quiet.          

When they arrive at the scene, Sara keeps one eye on him, the other on their walk-through. She considers: Maybe she’s projecting, seeing self-loathing in him because that’s what she feels, deciding he is doing poorly when she’s the one who’s on the edge. It wouldn’t be the first time that she had assumed they were in the same place when they weren’t.

But no.

The longer they remain on scene, the more she becomes certain that her first assessment is the correct one. He’s got that broken-down look again. He’s stopped on the perimeter of the scene, and he’s staring out over the yard. When she tries to talk case details to him, he comes across like a cowboy concealing a fatal gunshot wound, playing the hero at the end of a spaghetti western, like he’s dying but trying to make brave speeches through it. She knows she probably should allow him his stoicism, but she also can’t help herself.

“You okay?” she asks.        

Her question startles him. “Uh—”

“You’ve just seemed maybe a little, uh,” she searches for a benign word, not something more revealing like _pained_ or _heartbroken_ , which more immediately come to mind, “—subdued. Not just tonight. For a while now.” She could say since she got back from California, but she doesn’t. “It’s, um, none of my business, I know, but I just—”

She could pour her heart out, telling him that she needs him to be all right because she isn’t; explaining that while there’s no hope for fixing her, not after the B&B, there is hope for him. There always has been. She could be honest. Say that if she knew for certain he was well, somehow she could move on. She could lay it out more plainly than she ever has before.

But.

“Are you okay?”

This time, her question sounds smaller.

Now she really looks at him, seeing only his face amid the natural darkness and synthetic light crisscrossing the chaos in the yard. She watches him thinking, which is something she has always loved to do, knowing that beneath his expression, between the synapses of his brain, there are strong, beautiful thoughts traveling at the speed of light down his neural pathways. In him, there is fervor, a genius that she has access to more often than almost anyone in the world, she knows. Usually, she loves his thoughts, but tonight she isn’t sure she can, not when he can’t love himself. She holds her breath.

“Change is hard,” he says finally.

It wasn’t any of the dodges she was expecting. It’s also the understatement of the year or the century even. It’s everything that’s been wearing them down to dust, ever since she moved to Vegas.

Neither one of them is good with change, but they need to be.

“It is,” Sara allows. “But it can be good, too. Worth it, you know? Sometimes you’ve got to adapt or—”

“—die.”

His interpolation proves the difficulty he feels, maybe with their current situation, maybe with his life in a grander sense. Change is hard, so he tries to remain in stasis, but no one can remain in stasis forever, not without sacrificing something vital.

“Maybe. But sometimes you’ve got to adapt to live.”

She’s a hypocrite, talking this way. God knows she hasn’t ever really changed herself. But she’s a different case than he is. She’s been made out of busted stuff since the beginning, so there has never been anything good for her to change into. Nothing salvageable. Grissom is better. Has actual potential energy. If he could will himself to finally move on from her, his whole life could improve. She truly believes that for him.

He smiles but still looks sad around the eyes. “Always the consummate Darwinist,” he says. He sounds approving, but Sara doesn’t know what he truly thinks.

The investigation drags on, in part due to how many people were involved in the crash, in part because the suspect dies three days after the crash takes place, and his parents are reluctant to cooperate following his death. When an outcast kid crashes a truck into a house where his more popular classmates are partying, there are always questions of intentionality. Nobody wants to learn that their child has done something so horrific on purpose, and especially not when the death toll has mounted to three. It’s hard going for Sara and Grissom to get through the front door into the suspect’s house and harder going still to entice the grieving parents to talk about their son’s mental state prior to his death. It takes four phone calls and two home visits before they’re finally invited inside, and, even then, the parents are stony-faced and silent.

“This all must be very difficult,” Grissom says.

Sara sits beside him on the living room couch. The tension in the room is familiar to her, of the same sort she used to feel on mornings after her parents had had pounding-up-the-stairs nights. There is a kind of hard silence that pervades when something violent has happened, and no one can bring themselves to speak afterwards. She doesn’t mean to, but she leans close to Grissom. Their thighs run up against each other on the couch cushion, even though they could both have their own space. Grissom doesn’t seem to mind the contact. He doesn’t move away.

“We’d like to have your permission to search your son’s room,” Sara says.

“To look for what?” the father counters. “Proof that our son was a psycho? Some kind of killer? Is that what you want?”

“All we want is the truth,” says Grissom, collected, his voice still soft and tone polite, “—and to find out what that is, we need to have a better understanding of what was going on in his mind on the night of the crash. We know he sometimes text messaged his friends. Did he also talk to them online? Maybe have a personal computer?”

Sara has always admired Grissom’s ability to remain placid in the face of other people’s anger. She has seen him maintain his composure even when faced by raging suspects and survivors driven to the edge by grief. There have been times when he has responded to her with calm when she has been upset—and even upset with him.

“We got him a laptop for Christmas,” the mother says, finally seeming to relent. She casts a glance at her husband and then, with his unspoken approval, gestures for Sara and Grissom to follow her upstairs to her son’s bedroom. Now instead of angry, she mostly seems defeated.

The suspect’s room is unremarkable, not plastered in posters the way some teenagers’ rooms are, mostly clean, except that the bed is unmade—an exhibit preserving the occasion when he kicked off his covers to start his final waking day. Sara waits until the mother takes her leave before addressing Grissom.

“You handled that well,” she says. “—downstairs, I mean. For a second, I thought they weren’t gonna let us up here.”

Grissom registers surprise but downplays with a shrug. “It’s the biological imperative for parents to protect their offspring."

“Sometimes,” Sara says, unable to prevent herself from making the qualification.

“Sometimes,” Grissom agrees.

There are a few seconds of silence as they begin to search around the room. For herself, Sara still feels off, the same way she did downstairs, on the verge of breaking her rules about remembering hard things. For Grissom, she feels concern, sensing that he has got some loud trouble inside him that’s making him stay quiet again.

“Are you okay?” “Are you okay?” 

They both ask the question at the same time, his voice overlapping hers. A beat as they meet eyes, realizing that they’ve just thought alike. Nervous eye contact gives way to amusement. Shy smiles now. Flushing heat. After another beat.

“How’s it going?” Grissom asks. “With the PEAP counselor, I mean?”

“Oh.”

The truth is, Sara hasn’t wanted to see Mark since she returned from California. After everything that happened on the bay, she wouldn’t know how to report to him. He wasn't aware of the activities she had planned for her trip—that she had wanted to perform some kind of ritual for closure at the B&B—only that she had been trying to put some things from her past to bed. Still, she feels too knotted up inside to discuss her failure with him, even in a general way. She also doesn’t want to have to explain how angry she is at herself for failing or to have him sense it on her. Keeping control over herself at work is difficult enough. Maintaining composure during therapy seems impossible.

“I’ve, uh, been going. Not since I got back from San Francisco. But I’ve only got a few more required sessions to go—”

“That’s good,” Grissom says, too quickly.

Just mentioning the remaining sessions gives a guilty twist to her stomach. Grissom is too polite to ever say so, but he probably has Cavallo breathing down his neck about her.

“I’ll, uh, get the last two appointments in soon,” she promises.

Grissom nods but doesn’t say anything about a timetable.

He also never answers her question about whether or not he is okay.

It takes a week and a half for them to close the case. In the end, Doc Robbins rules the manner of the suspect’s death indeterminate, unable to say one way or another whether the boy meant to kill himself and his classmates or not.

By now, it is the first week in September, though no one seems to have told the temperature as much. During the days, the thermometer mercury still peaks in the hundreds with the kind of heat that captures in the fabric of clothes and radiates off asphalt, turning the whole city into a skillet on a burner.

Sara isn’t sure how she’s feeling, maybe because it’s too many things at once. She carries her anger as if it were a cigarette she was always either smoking or saving as a stub for later. Her memories are the lighter. Keeping them from stoking at work exhausts her, which is maybe why she focuses so much on Grissom, giving over to concern for him—because taking an interest in his issues makes putting off her own easier. She is probably falling into that old trap of being responsible for someone else’s feelings and of trying to fix someone else’s problems because she cannot fix hers again, but she doesn’t care.

She just doesn’t want to see Grissom hate himself anymore, especially not on her account.

So at the lab, she tries to be bright for him, to talk to him about anything. She knows how sometimes one’s own thoughts can become an echo chamber, and she wants to help him hear something else, some positive feedback, so she’s all reassurances and logic, all reminders that he’s human and real, that he has nothing to blame himself for.

Gradually, she thinks she sees him relaxing, coming out of his head a bit.

After they wrap the vehicular homicide, they both move on to separate cases. He takes a carjacking that put a woman in the hospital. She takes a robbery at one of the small off-Strip casinos. They haven’t seen each other much over the last few days, busy with their respective investigations. Sara is stepping out of PD when she spots Grissom. He seems to be on his way to PD from the lab, but he is paused on the sidewalk, leaned up against one of the concrete planters outside the building. His neck is craned back, his face turned upwards. If they weren’t in the city with all its light pollution, she would think he was stargazing.

“Hey,” she says. He looks back to the earth, to her. “Getting some fresh air?”

Within Las Vegas boundaries, there is really no such thing. He smiles at her joke but then doesn’t say anything, just watches her. His attention makes her nervous. It feels like he’s seeing too much through her again.

“Brass just sent his guys out to pick up our suspect. How is, uh—?” She means to ask about his case, the condition of the woman in the hospital, but finding words proves difficult.

Grissom knows what she means to ask, even without the end of the sentence. “They’ve upgraded her to stable condition. Greg is running the DNA from under her fingernails.”

“Glad she got a piece of the guy.”

“Yeah.”

A long pause, the sound of angry traffic and city revels in the distance, Grissom’s expression unreadable, her burning to the ground. She starts to think that she should go—wave goodbye to him and get back to the lab, but he stops her.

“You, uh, still have a couple weeks of vacation left,” he observes.

She nods. “Uh huh.”

“Were you, um, planning on taking it?”

It’s a peculiar question, and she doesn’t know what his motivation is for asking it. Does he want her to take more time off, or would he prefer that she not? Her confusion must show on her face, because he quickly explains.

“I just, uh—I know this guy from the UNLV Astronomy Department, and he’s, uh, putting together a research team to track the September Epsilon Perseids. It’s only a minor meteor shower, but, uh, he’s looking for a physicist to help him with some calculations. He wants somebody who can do calculus on the fly in the desert. When I saw the call for applicants, I thought of you.”

She couldn’t be more disoriented if he were to spin her in circles. Again, her confusion must show, because Grissom elaborates.

“The shower is supposed to be really phenomenal this year, the best it’s been since ’97. If you were interested, I could put you in touch with Paul.”

She can’t think of what to say except. “I’m not an astrophysicist.”

He shrugs. “You don’t need to be. He’ll handle the astronomy as long as you handle the math.” He smiles, the lines around his eyes creasing.

Jesus.

Sara hadn’t expected—well, anything that just happened. She feels dizzy and caught off guard, almost the way she did when she first met him, and he was so charming. She’s flattered and flustered and not sure how to process the fact that Grissom heard about a scientific research study and immediately thought, _You know who would be good at this? Sara._ The whole conversation has just been surreal. Part of her wonders if he isn’t trying to get rid of her for a while, but no. What he’s saying is just kind. Sweet, really. Heat radiates from her skin.

“When—uh, when would it be?”

“Next week, September 9th to 18th. They’ll be stationed out in Tonopah.”

“Oh, yeah. They’re famous for having some of the darkest nighttime skies in the country.”

“Right.” A pause, and Grissom stands up from the planter. “Think it over. Let me know.”

Sara does think. A lot. Back to when he sent her to the conference in San Diego. To everything that’s happened over the last few weeks. To the strange way that Grissom has been acting around her lately. She doesn’t know if anything she’s done since returning from California has been right or if she has made any progress towards getting him closure. She isn’t sure how she should feel in regards to him, and particularly not in regards to this gesture.

In the morning, when she gets home after shift, there’s an invoice in the mail from Mark’s practice listing the session she attended in August and showing that the LVPD has been billed for it. She still has two more required sessions to attend, and, God, she isn’t ready, but she needs to go—and especially because she told Grissom she would.

Maybe she can sidestep talking about what happened in Tomales Bay if she tells Mark about what’s been going on with Grissom since she got back to Vegas instead.

She keeps wondering if Grissom has an ulterior motive in recommending her for this research trip, and maybe he does, but it doesn’t seem that way. The way he looked at her outside PD tells her that he just wants her happy, like he’s trying to do for her the same thing she is trying to do for him.

—and perhaps that’s what will ultimately get them through.

With great reluctance, she schedules her last two sessions with Mark, one for September 8th and one for September 20th. Then she emails Grissom an answer.

 _Could I get Paul’s contact info? I’m interested in the Tonopah trip._  
  
_—S_

Grissom emails back almost immediately, like he was waiting by the computer for her response: Paul’s name, email address, departmental address, and nothing else. She is half-tempted to shoot back another question, asking him if she should drop his name when she submits Paul her query, but it turns out not to be necessary. Paul replies to initial introduction by accepting her application, CV yet unseen.

_Sara,_

_So glad to make you part of the team. Gil spoke very highly of you. Considering his glowing recommendation, I’m surprised he's willing to part with you even for ten days, but his deprivation is our gain. I’ll send you our expedition dossier, and my secretary will be in contact with paperwork. I look forward to meeting you in Tonopah._

_Paul_

Sara hadn’t realized that Grissom had already spoken to Paul on her behalf, and especially not that he talked her up so much. Maybe she shouldn’t be so curious, but she wonders what he said. Did he perhaps oversell her qualifications? Her master’s degree is in physics, but she hasn’t been in the field for years. She hopes Paul isn’t expecting the best and brightest of the UC Berkeley Physics Department, because God knows she isn’t that.

She wants to ask Grissom for some kind of heads-up about what she should expect, but, aside from some quick passing in the halls, she doesn’t actually see him much in-between her acceptance to the research team and the day of her departure. By now, they’re both on new cases. He’s off working a homicide in Henderson with Greg, while she’s with Nick, Warrick, and Catherine looking for the rest of the body that belongs to an amputated human leg that washed up in Lake Mead.

On the day of her last shift, she gets called in early because Catherine turned up a new lead—something about human remains dragged up on somebody’s fishing line. She gets to the lab by four o’clock in the afternoon and has just come out of the locker room when she happens on Grissom in the hallway. He is dressed very nicely, wearing a suit and tie, and he carries a box of papers and other items in his arms. Evidence, maybe.

“You have court today?” she asks.

It’s an obvious question, but it still seems to take him by surprise. He shifts, nervous. “Uh—” For some reason, he won’t look her in the eyes.

She doesn’t have the chance to figure out why he’s being so jumpy before Brass appears around the corner. “Gil, we just got a hit on our BOLO.”

Grissom’s mouth is still open. He’s caught between his inability to answer her simple question and his need to hurry after Brass. She has no idea why he’s acting so strangely, but she decides to spare him the trouble of responding to her.

“Catch you later,” she says, leaving the scene before he can say anything else. She gives Brass a parting nod.

Her only guess about Grissom is that she must have interrupted his thoughts. Otherwise, she can’t account for his behavior. In any case, Catherine soon catches up with her, ready to take her back to the lake. They spend all afternoon there, processing the fishing equipment and supervising a diving team. Warrick and Nick show up around sundown. Eventually, their findings lead them to a cabin near Callville Bay, where they get a break on the identity of their vic. It’s almost six in the morning by the time they make it back to the lab, stinking of the marina but with a suspect in custody. Though there is still work to be done, Catherine dismisses her.

“You’ve got a drive ahead of you,” she says. “The boys and I will take it from here.”

Since she left the lab yesterday afternoon, Sara hasn’t thought about Grissom—just the case and everything she has to do before she gets to Tonopah. Her penultimate appointment with Mark is scheduled for today, and she has nine hours to emotionally prepare herself. She’s thinking about how much truth she wants to tell versus how much she wants to conceal, how to characterize her trip to California and everything that has happened since her return. She opens her locker, mechanical, ready to put her vest away and reclaim her street shoes. Immediately, she sees something inside that she didn’t put there.

A small package, oddly shaped and wrapped in parcel paper, tied neatly with a twined string.

Though all the lockers have padlocks on them, she isn’t in the habit of using hers except for when she goes home between shifts. The lab is a secure building, and the only people who ever enter the locker room are personnel. Theft is highly unlikely. She trusts her teammates. One of them must have used her open locker to their advantage, leaving the package inside. She has a good idea which one it was, but she can’t force herself to think his name yet. She has to be certain.

She takes the package from its shelf. Holding it, she can tell that it contains more than one object. There is something small but heavy, probably metallic, and something else flat and light, probably paper. Turning the package over in her hands, she sees her name written on the wrapping written in a familiar flowing script. Her breath catches, preemptory. She knows what this is.

Grissom’s birthday gift to her.

She’ll be in Tonopah on the actual day, so he must have decided to give her something in advance. Even before she opens the package, what she feels is like a first light appearing on a horizon, uncolored but still warm and welcome, dissipating night inside her; a day, a day, a day. Whatever lies she’ll tell Mark later, she must be honest with herself now: She still loves Gilbert Grissom, and if anyone were to ask her why, considering everything that’s passed between them, she would only have to point to small sweetnesses like this one to explain. He is so surpassingly kind to her, no matter how strange their little cosmos.

Heat spreads down from the cap of her head, and, in spite of herself, she smiles. Carefully, she unties the twine and slits the tape holding the parcel paper with her nail. She holds her breath as if she were a child about to blow out her birthday candles, then slides the package contents gently out into her hand. The heavier object falls out first: a compass, plain and likely old, the shell somewhat tarnished but the mechanisms in working order. The next object follows: a map, antique, with yellowed paper. But it isn’t of any place on earth. It’s of the stars, with the constellations personified in illustration, sketched along the arcing lines of the orbital axes. If she had to guess, she would say it was at least a hundred years old, maybe more.

She doesn’t understand the significance of either object, and there is nothing else left in the package—no kind of explanation. But then she notices the weight of the star atlas, perhaps heavier than it should be. Setting the compass back on her locker shelf, she unfolds the atlas seams. Sure enough, something emerges from inside. Whatever it is slips past her hand, falling to the floor, where it lands at her feet. She glimpses enough on the descent to see that, like the atlas, it is paper. Maybe a card. She stoops to retrieve it.

It’s a photograph of her and Grissom, taken five years ago on Marshall Beach.

The Golden Gate Bridge stands behind them, and Grissom has his arm around her. She remembers: They asked some guy with a metal detector to take the picture using her camera. He didn’t count to three or tell them to say _cheese_ , just snapped the button, capturing Grissom in the earliest stages of a smile. Now, forever, Grissom's expression is not the false, frozen happiness typical of tourist shots. Instead, he looks almost somehow proud.

Beside him, she is beaming.

Grissom had already returned home to Vegas by the time she got the roll developed, so she sent him a copy of the shot enclosed in her next letter to him. She still has her copy in a box in her bedroom closet. She hasn’t dared look at it in years.

With uncertain hands, she turns over the photo and sees that Grissom has written something on the back. Compared to his previous letter, the message is haltingly brief, and yet, once she reads it, she suddenly can’t breathe.

_Sara,  
_

_So you can always find your way home._

_Many happy returns._

_Grissom_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for you patience in waiting for the chapter. I hope the length makes up for the lag at least a little bit.


	9. Chapter 9

**IX.**

He sends her into the desert with nothing but his recommendation, a compass, and a star map to guide her home.

He has good reasons, he thinks.

For one thing, the expedition requires someone with her exact expertise. She told him recently that the aspect she most enjoys about physics, both applied and theoretical, is the math, so she’ll like calculating the trajectories of heavenly bodies as much as she’ll excel at doing so.

For another thing, she’ll be with people, some of whom he knows. With all her other absences this summer, he has had to worry about where she has gone and whether or not she’s been alone. Now he can be certain that she is with friendly company, and he has no doubt that once they come to know her, the other scientists will think she’s wonderful. She has always been easy to adore, and especially under moonlight, at her most brilliant, counting stars.

Further, he knows, in an implicit, bone-deep way, that she is, like him, by nature, a sky watcher, in love with the universe’s finer workings, comforted by its machinations, its pure and perfect science. To look up and see fire in the heavens, to her, is holy. No human cathedral could match the awe, the sense of being so small beneath something so vast. Of any team member he could have chosen, she is the one who will most appreciate viewing the stark and simple beauty of the autumnal Perseids away from the neon city.

Then, finally, secretly, there is one last thing: That the expedition is the second part of his birthday gift to her, something that he wants her to experience because he always wants to give her everything that is lovely. Since jewelry and flowers are in their strange flux verboten, these falling stars are a next best offering, the closest approximation to what he feels for her beneath all scars and skin and sentience. The compass and the map, even the photograph, were all that he could manage in a rush, sentimental and helpless. But the stars require no explanations and no apologies on his part. They mean exactly what he cannot say, a kind of promise, an offering.

Those are his good reasons.

His bad reason is that he needs to send her away for a time because he can feel himself about to do something foolish, and he requires space to regather his composure, a pause from her and how kind she has been to him over these last few weeks. Despite all his rules for governing his heart, he’s been falling in love with her again, more and deeper than he has before. Standing with her on the lawn at their crime scene beneath the arcing, orange lights, hearing her speak to the vitality of change, he felt, more than ever, that he wanted to be with her. If she had waited maybe one second longer before returning to the task at hand, he might have asked her—

He can’t say exactly what. Only something that wouldn’t have been fair for her or feasible for him. Something that may have cost them both their jobs and ruined them forever.

Whenever he stands beside her, he feels components inside him shifting and changing, falling into place. Lately, she has gotten in the habit of telling him that whatever he may think, he isn’t actually deficient, and, when he is with her, he can almost believe that she is right—or at least he wonders if maybe for her he could be better; if being present with her makes him so.

It’s a dangerous feeling, heady and tempting, and if he is going to reason his way down, then he needs just a few days to himself, some time to remaster his expectations and desires. By the time Sara returns from Tonopah, he’ll be clearheaded again and on his best behavior. He won’t keep getting his hopes up when nothing can ever come from them.

He tries to busy himself in her absence, focusing on his cases and administrivia.

Ever since last spring, Greg has been searching for his own replacement in DNA. Normally, the responsibility for filling an emptied position would fall entirely on Grissom, but since Greg is only transferring within the department, not quitting, Grissom told him that it was his job to bring in his own successor. Following a lengthy preliminary scouting period and several rounds of interviews, Greg thinks he’s finally settled on a candidate. Grissom can’t remember her name or where she is from, but Greg says she comes with really excellent credentials, so Grissom is willing to give her a shot. Trial by fire or at least something like.

Now it’s up to him secure department approval for the hire.

Since Cavallo already has one foot out the door, he gives Grissom leeway on everything from training schedules to assigning a starting salary. Do whatever is best for the shift, he says, and he’ll sign off.

The trouble is that Grissom hasn’t been able to catch up with Cavallo to get him to do the signing.

With his retirement fast approaching, Cavallo has drastically reduced his hours at the lab. He comes in to work late in the day and cuts out early, and he is never around during Grissom’s shift. He also hasn’t been responding to emails. Ecklie still has yet to officially be named assistant director after Cavallo, so Grissom can’t even bypass Cavallo’s involvement to expedite the process. He can only lurk outside Cavallo’s office during the day shift, hoping that at some point the Law of Total Probability will work in his favor.

Of course, the lurking might not be so bad if Grissom were the only one doing it, but Greg keeps hanging around, waiting for him in the same way that he is waiting for Cavallo, anxious for the greenlight to move over completely to fieldwork. Greg knows better than to pester, but he does tend to skulk, hovering in doorways and the locker bay, always with the same expectant look on his face.

“I can’t let you go from DNA until your replacement is hired and fully trained,” Grissom reminds him.

“Yeah. Of course,” Greg says, but he still remains underfoot.

He also doesn’t fully heed what Grissom says about still needing him in the lab. He constantly volunteers himself to assist Catherine, Warrick, and Nick on their cases, and because they all like having a gofer, he is frequently away from DNA.

When he first started training as a CSI, Grissom told him that his new endeavor wasn’t to preempt his tech work, but now he’s using his involvement with other team members’ cases as an excuse to remain in the field indefinitely, never mind the backlog he’s accumulated on his desk in DNA.

“I’m sorry,” he says, though he’s clearly not. “I didn’t know this carjacking thing was gonna turn into a homicide investigation. I guess I could tell Warrick that I need to get back to the lab—”

But the truth is that for as much as Grissom needs a DNA tech, he also needs Greg out in the field. No trainee can replace a CSI Level III—can replace _Sara_ —no matter how eager said trainee may be, but just having another pair of hands available has been useful, given Sara’s absence. Telling Greg to run here and there following up on experiments and lab reports frees up the rest of the team to do hard processing and trial prep.

That’s why Grissom permits Greg to keep taking on new cases—though in addition to his tech assignments, not in place of them.

In the meantime, with the logjam on the new hire, Grissom focuses his attention on other administrative issues.

First item. Ecklie’s impending promotion to Assistant Director has resulted in some “musical chairs” around the lab, with various people switching offices as they move into new positions. Typically assistant shift supervisors aren’t granted offices of their own—just a desk in a shared communal space—but Catherine has been hinting that she would like her own office for years, so Grissom enters a request on her behalf. God knows that she deserves it, particularly as if she were not so intensely loyal to him, she would have already been a shift supervisor in her own right. The least Grissom can do for her is ask.

Second item. The lab budget runs on a yearly trimester system, and the second trimester just drew to a close at the end of August. For once the department remained under budget, which means that there is some carryover money available going into the third and final trimester. Since the situation is “use it or lose it,” the lab director has distributed the carryover funds evenly between the three shifts, meaning that Grissom now has some cash to burn. Some of the money will go towards the new hire and furnishing Greg’s salary as a CSI, but there is enough left over that Grissom can purchase materials, too.

Nick and Warrick have already made their cases for various state-of-the-art software packages and other digital toys, but Grissom has an eye for more practical apparatuses. After shopping around, he has settled on an infrared camera that can be used to observe heat signatures.

Compared to the fancy tech showcased at conferences, the camera is far from glamorous. Neither Nick nor Warrick is thrilled by the idea of it, and they’ve both pointed out that the team will probably only have reason to use it once or maybe twice a year. Catherine is more indifferent. She can see the possibilities, but, then again, she would have preferred the extra funds to go towards beefing up the Christmas bonuses.

Maybe that is why, despite his best intentions, Grissom finds Sara slipping into his mind as he is filling out the purchase forms. It’s a silly thing, an inexplicable sense, but somehow he knows she’ll smile the first time they use the camera in the field. Take careful notes on the readings. She’s a modern criminalist, but she has an appreciation for old-fashioned things. It’s one of the many predilections which attracts Grissom to her.

He finds himself thinking about Sara more and more as the days go on, until, one week into her trip, she fully pervades his mind.

It is Thursday. Her birthday.

She is thirty-three years old.

Even now that Sara has passed four birthdays in Las Vegas, Grissom has yet to find a way to celebrate them with her that doesn’t muddle delicately drawn lines. To ignore the day seems cold, but to acknowledge it is to say more than perhaps ought to be said—more than he feels comfortable saying.

Now his general awkwardness in regards to her is compounded by the math, which for three-hundred and sixty-four days a year, he typically disregards, but on this day he can’t help but do, the numbers crunching in his head again and again and again.

The truth is that just thinking about her age ties his stomach in knots.

He and Sara were both adults when they first met in San Francisco. Fact. He wasn’t her boss then. Fact. They were both available. Fact. But he is also fifteen years older than she. Inescapable fact. He is her boss now. Another inescapable fact. He is an older man, and she is a young woman. Fact. Fact. Fact.

Fifteen years is a long time, the better part of a generation, and in practical terms what it means is that while Grissom is now thoroughly Prufrockian, Sara is young enough that bartenders still card her just to be on the safe side. Though she was an adult when Grissom met her, he was a freshman in high school the year she was born, and he had long since earned his PhD and begun working as a CSI Level III by the time she reached her own freshman year. Her first year as a CSI, he turned forty. She wasn’t even thirty when she moved to Las Vegas, but he already had gray in his hair.

He is acutely aware of what his attraction to her looks like from the outside, of what people might think—or, God forbid, say—if only they knew.

He is also acutely aware of Sara at the heart of everything. Sara, who is thirty-three. Sara, who has her whole life still ahead of her. Maybe when she was twenty-six years old, the idea of an older man appealed to her, but what would she want with him now? In his heart of hearts, Grissom knows that even if he weren’t Sara’s boss and he was without all his other deficiencies, she deserves someone who can share milestones with her.

He can barely allow himself to think it—only on the brink of consciousness, on the peripheries of his mind, on his loneliest nights, right before he falls asleep—but if he were ever to muster his courage, and if by some miracle she were somehow to forgive him and still want him after so much time, no matter how happy she claimed to be, he would still know, deep down, that he was depriving her of the kind of life she ought to have.

There are things that she might not even be thinking about now that she could come to want in the future, and he wouldn’t be able to give them to her, not in the same way that a man her own age could.

That’s the thought he tried to content himself with when she was dating her medic.

It is also the thought that haunts him now as he thinks about her out in the desert and wonders if she knows that he tried to give her shooting stars for her birthday.

He redoubles his efforts to constrain himself.

On Friday, he manages to catch Cavallo in the parking lot and get the signature on the new hire. Greg says that the new girl can start on Tuesday—the same day Sara is due back from Tonopah. To distract himself from Sara’s homecoming, Grissom schedules Greg’s final CSI Level I certification proficiency exam for that day and hopes that they’ll catch a case that will keep them busy. He then spends the weekend working a homicide on the Strip.

The day of Sara’s return is chaos. The infrared camera arrived via UPS at the start of swing shift and is sitting on his desk waiting for him as soon as he clocks in. His call-outs also proliferate. There is a shooting at a nightclub, a dead hooker in a hotel, and a 419 in a no-fly zone out in the desert. Catherine hates her new office, and she isn’t shy about letting him know how much. Greg immediately breaks an Erlenmeyer flask trying to impress the new girl. Nick and Warrick are bucking to go. Everyone and everything is buzzing.

In the middle of it all is Sara, looking more vivid than she has in months—dressed in color, seeming breathless. Grissom barely gets the chance to speak with her, only to ask her, vaguely, about her PEAP and not even her time in the desert, before she’s out the door on a case with Nick, and he’s dragging Greg along to his proficiency test.

On the drive over to the nightclub, Grissom plans out in advance the conversation he will have with her when she comes to tell him goodbye at the end of shift. He’ll ask her about the desert: Paul’s team, their findings, and how the Perseids looked against a backdrop of seemingly infinite Tonopah darkness. Whatever she says, he’ll tell her that he—or _the lab_ —is glad to have her back now. Maybe if he is feeling particularly brave or the conversation is flowing especially well, he’ll show her the infrared camera. Gather her thoughts on how best to use it.

But supervisors plan, and the universe laughs.

Everyone’s cases end up spilling over into double shifts, requiring multiple field runs and extra back and forth with PD. The new girl doesn’t last the cycle. By Wednesday night, she calls it quits—saying something about the workload being unreasonable. Worst of all, Greg’s proficiency test is a disaster.

Not only does Greg show up late to his scenes and lollygag once he’s there, but he contaminates potential evidence by using the restroom facilities at the primary—a rule that even the most thickheaded beat cops know better than to break.

His poor performance takes Grissom by surprise. With all the field time Greg had logged in Sara’s absence, Grissom anticipated that he would be able to pass his test with flying colors.

Reflecting back now, his error in judgment becomes apparent: Greg has been out in the field a lot lately but always with different team members and never with one specific trainer. While he has learned a lot about how to think, no one has systematically schooled him in the basics. He has no muscle memory on procedures. Everyone assumed that he already knew all the protocols or otherwise that someone else was teaching him. Though it is true that he has excellent aptitudes and possesses many natural gifts, Grissom realizes now that he still needs mentorship.

Grissom spends the last leg of his shift dealing with the new girl’s sudden departure and delivering Greg the bad and good news: he failed the test, but he has the option to retake it, provided he can find another—permanent—replacement for himself in DNA prior to his new exam date.

By the time all is said and done, Grissom doesn’t even see Sara again. She and Nick wrap their case, and then she’s gone.

—and despite his good intentions, Grissom doesn’t get around to talking to her at all during the next few days, either, not in the way he intended to, not about Tonopah or her birthday or her PEAP sessions or anything more personal than experiment results and police bulletins.

The busyness at the lab continues, with cases flooding in and piling up and the whole team working at all hours.

During the brief interludes between cases when Grissom swings home to spend a moment with the dog, check the mail, and maybe for a few hours sleep, he considers calling Sara, knowing that perhaps his best chance to talk to her would be when they are not at the lab.

They used to call each other on the phone back when she still lived in San Francisco and sometimes during her first year in Las Vegas. He has never been a skilled phone conversationalist, but she picked up his slack—intuited when to talk through his silences and when to share them, somehow knowing the difference between the inexpressible and everything else. That she could be quiet on the phone with him seemed a miracle. Most people wouldn’t be patient enough. Most people would find some excuse to get off the line, to disconnect.

In retrospect, he realizes that part of the reason he stopped calling her was because he was losing his hearing. If she was silent by choice, he could adore the gift that she was giving him. But if his silence, the dull growing nothing in his ears, swallowed up her voice, taking away not just her choice but his, he couldn’t cope. Better not to risk missing words, missing laughter, missing the soft shush of her breath against the receiver telling him that she was alive and listening.

He thinks now that he can hear again, maybe he can call her.

For a few days, he convinces himself that he is building up to it—that if he just allows himself some time to script a conversation beforehand, he’ll eventually be able to dial the numbers—but as always he takes too long to make his move.

Things are even more chaotic at the lab now than they were one week ago when Sara first returned to work, and to make matters worse, the weather is exacerbating the team’s caseload.

Torrential rain beats down on the city like vengeance for its innumerable sins, staining the desert’s golds to slurried browns, casting everything dark and violent under angry clouds. Such storms occur annually in Las Vegas as the first autumnal cold fronts from the mountains collide with the summer heat swells still radiating off the valley, and yet every year they seem to catch the city by surprise. Flash floods strand motorists and cause a sharp increase in traffic accidents. Gutters and sewers inevitably overflow. Every undeveloped lot and grassless yard becomes a mud trap. Pets and people go missing. The phones at PD and Emergency Services ring off the hooks.

Grissom goes with Catherine and Warrick to investigate a dead guy found washed up in a storm drain, but he doesn’t stay on scene for long, not when there’s so much to do. Instead, he catches a ride back to the lab with David Phillips and attends the post with Doc and Greg. He spends the entire night in the lab, working three cases simultaneous to this one. Sometime after 2 AM, he realizes that there rain has stopped drumming on the roof.

Sara is around somewhere, but he doesn’t get the chance to see her. She had a late night preliminary hearing for a case she worked last winter. Since she has gotten back from court, he doesn’t know where she has disappeared to, and he hasn’t had time to track her down—especially now that Warrick and Catherine have turned up a second set of human remains, seemingly unrelated to the first, on the last leg of their adventure through the city’s drainage system.

This body is skeletal and partial. Doc says the bones belong to a young, Caucasian adolescent, but he is unable to zero in on the victim’s identity any more than that, as aside from an incised perimortem defect on the ribs, there are no identifying characteristics on the bones, and Greg can’t pull any DNA from them because they’re too degraded.

Catherine elects to search for potential matches from the missing persons database with Nick while Grissom starts devising an experiment that will allow him to test how the chemical cocktail in the average Las Vegas sanitation reservoir might affect decomp processes in human tissues. Warrick says he’s going back to the neighborhood where the bones were found to knock doors with Brass—and, oh yeah, he’s taking Sara with him.

Grissom only considers Sara’s whereabouts again when just a few hours later he happens on Warrick in the break room. Going door-to-door in an area where remains have been discovered is oftentimes an all-day job. The fact that Warrick is back so soon suggests that he and Sara either had immediate success or none at all. Homerun or strikeout. Considering Warrick’s demeanor, the latter option seems more likely.

“Nothing doing, huh?” Grissom guesses.

Warrick makes a derisive sound. “Too much doing,” he corrects.

Grissom looks at him, intrigued. Oh?

He elaborates: “Brass got us a beat on a kid named Owen Durbin who liked to throw things down the sewers in the neighborhood where the remains were found. Turns out, the things he liked to throw were fireworks, so Brass got us a warrant to search inside the Durbin residence. The warrant only covered bottle rockets and ground spinners, but we figured—”

“If you happened to find other evidence inside the residence while you were executing your search, you could get the warrant expanded to cover it,” Grissom infers.

“Right,” Warrick says. “So Sara and I go inside, and, sure enough, not five minutes in, we start pulling ammo out from cupboards and guns from under the couch. Then Sara spots some blood on the stairs. Could be incidental, but—”

“Better safe than sorry,” Grissom infers again.

The longer Warrick’s story goes on, the more Grissom begins to wonder if there’s going to be a real point to it. The guns, ammo, and blood in the Durbin residence could all be coincidental—any defense lawyer worth her legal license would argue that. There isn’t an inherent link between them and the human bones found in the sewer along the Durbin’s street. Unless Warrick and Sara turned up something much more probative later on in their search, Grissom isn’t certain that there’s anything to get excited about.

Warrick smirks, picking up on Grissom’s impatience. He nods as if to assure him that the story will eventually get good. “The blood is cause enough to expand the search, so Brass tells me and Sara to hang tight while he goes to get the warrant amended. But of course we’re not just gonna wait around while he finds a judge who’ll sign the papers. We’re gonna do some looking in the meanwhile. So we start heading up to the second floor, where we get to a hall closet. Sara opens it up to check inside, and I’m not really paying attention at first ‘cause I’m scoping out what’s behind us. But then I turn around, and I see there’s another shotgun in there, and—get this—six active pipe bombs.”

The reaction is automatic, like someone flips a switch: Grissom’s heartbeat picks up. He feels pressure in his neck, a hard throb just below his jawline. Logically, he knows the story doesn’t end in tragedy, not when Warrick’s being so nonchalant. Still, he can’t move. Can’t speak. He hangs on the possibilities, waiting, needing to hear the words: _So we called the bomb squad and immediately left the premises._

Warrick smirks again. “I radio for backup and get ready to book, but then Sara pulls out a wrench and starts taking the closet door off the hinges ‘cause there’s blood evidence on it. Every time she pops another bolt off, the whole door is shaking, and I’m thinking, _You are gonna get us killed_ , but she just keeps going—”

It’s stupid, Grissom realizes. The story has to have a happy ending, otherwise Warrick wouldn’t keep smirking, otherwise someone would have called him, otherwise deep in his soul he would somehow just know. But regardless, his heart still runs away from him like he is about to hear bad news, and his ears ring, and his skin sears, and he thinks, without meaning to, _I’d never forgive myself_ , and then, _I’d never get the chance to—_ only just managing to stop.

“Anyway, we get the door, and by time we head outside, the bomb squad’s already there, and the lieutenant is screaming at us for taking so long. They ended up having to extract the bombs and do a controlled detonation in a containment chamber. They say they’re gonna need a few hours to perform an initial sweep over the rest of the property, so there’s no way we’re getting back there until at least this afternoon.”

For Warrick, Sara’s stubborn refusal to leave the residence without the door is just one part of the long, strange anecdote, less concerning on the whole than the presence of the bombs or the fact that the team isn’t going to be able to get anywhere near the scene again until the premises are cleared. But to Grissom, it feels like missing a stair in the dark, like he could have just lost everything without even knowing what was happening. He can’t muster words for Warrick, so he scowls and leaves the break room without getting any coffee.

He wants to believe that he is angry with Sara—blindingly angry at her—for doing something so reckless, for tempting the forces of the universe, for risking her life and Warrick’s. But of course he knows better instantly. What he feels isn’t real anger but fear and maybe also a kind of shocked sadness.

He doesn’t believe that Sara is actively suicidal, but he wonders if she does perhaps think her life is expendable—if maybe she is ambivalent. When she first returned from Tonopah, he had thought that she was doing better, that somehow she seemed lighter, but now he doesn’t know how to gauge her. If she can suppose for one second that a spot of blood evidence would ever be worth her life, then maybe he has been mistaken, and all the progress he had thought they were making has been nothing; then maybe she is still the same as she was on the morning he drove her home from PD after the traffic stop; then maybe she is still impossibly alone even when he is with her; still all alone everywhere; still something he has done wrong and wrong and wrong.

He can’t go to her now—not with his heartbeat still wild in his chest, not when he is unsure what he might say or do. So he waits until later in the shift, until finally he has calmed. By now, he is headlong into an experiment to recreate the rapid decomp conditions in the sewer. The case is progressing. Last word from Brass was that the bomb squad was nearly ready to allow CSI to return to the Durbin residence to finish processing the scene.

He finds her in the garage, poring over the door she rescued. In such a vast, industrial space, she seems somehow smaller than usual. Everything around her is blue, shadow, and quiet. For as scared and sad as he felt initially after hearing about her stunt, seeing her now, his main emotion is gratitude that everything turned out as well as it did. Had things gone differently, he doesn’t know what he might have done. He doesn’t want to consider the potential loss. Instead, he allows himself to really take her in: to study her face and feel thankful that he gets to see it again, to determine that now he still has a chance to someday tell her something that matters.

She doesn’t speak to him when he enters the room. She doesn’t even look up at first. But he knows that she knows he is there. She is purposefully ignoring him, hiding behind a wall of silence. Though she can’t be certain if he has heard about what happened at the Durbin residence, she is safer to assume that he has. She keeps her head down, pursing her lips in a kind of performative concentration.

He can tell that she is scared of him again, the same as she was when he brought her home last May. She doesn’t want him to call her out because if he does things will get messy.

By now, he has known her long enough to realize that, for her, fear can sometimes translate into hostility—or perhaps more accurately a kind of false bravado. Of course, the response is biologically sound. In nature, prey animals behave similarly when confronted by their predators. When facing danger, they puff up, trying to make themselves seem threatening in the moment they are in actuality most threatened. She does the same. Whenever she feels vulnerable with him, she feigns invincibility, hoping that maybe he’ll accept her posturing at face value and leave her alone. If she feels like he is backing her into a corner, she’ll start talking a mile a minute, spouting ultimatums, not letting him get a word in edgewise, daring him to fire her, pretending like she wouldn’t care if he did. She acts like she has nothing to lose so that he’ll take nothing away from her. In the past, Grissom has sometimes allowed himself to be baited. But today he doesn’t want to make the same mistake.

He isn’t here to pick a fight. He just wants to have an honest conversation. So he waits, lingering in the doorway for a long while, trying to show her that he is being purposeful, considerate. His eyes remain trained on her. He stands completely still. Once he thinks she has had sufficient time to acclimate to his presence, he wanders over to look at the door and stand beside her.

Now comes the delicate part: He needs her to know that he doesn’t approve of her actions, but he can't make her feel like he thinks she's an idiot—because of course he doesn't. For her, this door isn’t just a door, and he gets it, and she needs to know that he gets it. He slips his hands into his pockets.

“So what were you trying to prove with this door?”

He knows right away that his tone is off. The question sounds judgmental and maybe even passive-aggressive. He meant to be unemotional. But around her, he never can be. He flinches, anticipating that she will meet his snark with snark.

But contrary to what he expects, she doesn’t seem to be stoking for a fight. “I was just collecting evidence,” she says, affecting detachment. She still isn’t really looking at him. She continues to check the door with her magnifying glass, examining its incidental markings.

Grissom knows she is trying to downplay. She probably doesn’t want to talk about whatever it is that made her feel like she should gamble with the bombs. Maybe she doesn’t even understand the impulse herself. He tries a different tack. “Well, Greg couldn't pull any DNA from the bones, so there's nothing to connect the victim to this anyway.”

Now Sara looks at him. Her brow furrows. “Not yet.” She acts as if the possibility that they may eventually discover new exemplars justifies the immense risk she took. Her expression is steely. The thought comes to Grissom, _She wants me to tell her that she’s wrong_. He reaches for the words, and she for a swab to lightly dab the door. He takes too long to respond. Now her eyes are downcast again, focused on her handiwork. “I don't have a death wish,” she says slowly, unsolicited, “and I'm not a drunk—in case you were worried.”

Her frankness catches him off-guard, as does her reference to the drinking, but the thing that most throws him is her assertion that he might be worried.

The word is a loaded one. She isn’t just implying that he is a supervisor looking out for his employee. The reference is to a deeper, more personal feeling. By _worried_ she means something closer to _guilty_. She thinks he might be blaming himself for her reckless behavior; that he is afraid that if she gets herself killed, he will be somehow culpable. She is trying to give him an emotional out, to convince him that he doesn’t have to hold himself accountable no matter what she does.

She’s right and wrong at the same time.

He has mistreated her, and he knows he has. He knows he maybe broke her. He has been selfish. Cruel, even. He made her want something but then treated her like she was crazy for wanting it. He made her feel something and then pretended like he didn’t also feel. Over the last four years, he has been misusing her, unintentionally but certainly, and for doing so, he does feel guilty. He does blame himself. He has every reason to.

If she hadn’t made it out of the Durbin house, he would never have forgiven himself. He can’t deny it. But his fear in this situation isn’t for solely himself and his complicity. He isn’t only worried that if Sara falls down, he’ll somehow be implicated. What he cares about is her life, not his guilt.

That’s where she is wrong.

He doesn’t want her to keep living like she has no one who cares about her because that isn’t true. He just needs to make sure that she knows. It is a pure feeling more than a languaged thought, something he understands on an ineffable level. He just wants her to be okay. He just wants her to be happy. He just wants her to feel cared about.

Loved.    

“I'm not worried,” he corrects her. “I'm concerned.”

It’s the closest he can come to saying what it is he feels, a claim he’ll have to substantiate better in the coming days and weeks. He says the words, and she looks in his eyes, and for a moment he feels like she can see right through him. The sensation is intense, too much, like a jolt of electricity. So he quickly glances away. Before he does something he knows he’ll regret, he forces himself to walk to his own corner of the garage where his decomp experiment waits for him. He wonders if Sara will let the conversation stop there, and she does remain silent for a few seconds.

But then.

“Isn't that kind of the same thing?”

Her tone is light, almost playful, but she looks at him deeply, and again he feels as if to her he were completely see-through. He isn’t sure if she has caught his intended meaning—if she knows what is implied by the one word but not the other. But she understands something perhaps almost more than he does. The way she looks at him, he feels caught on his tiptoes in a riptide, like he is about to be bowled over and carried out to sea. The conversation started with her on the defensive, but now he’s the one who needs to retreat.

Heat flushes over his skin, and he quickly reaches for his experiment, attempting to hide himself behind it. He opens the container, and the twin miasmas of sewer and death overwhelm the room. His evasion maneuver works as Sara makes a gagging face and turns away from him back to the door. She doesn’t force her question again. He makes no offer to further elaborate. Instead, he takes his notes, and she logs her door findings. Eventually, they part ways to follow up on other tasks.

Later in the day, the team minus Nick returns to the Durbin residence. The bomb squad lieutenant gives them permission to search the areas of the house that have already been cleared as long as they agree to vacate the premises immediately should he give the word.

By now, they have more circumstantial evidence linking Owen Durbin to the victim, who has been tentatively identified as a former classmate, fourteen year-old Travis Giles, previously reported missing by his grandmother. They have also begun to suspect that Owen’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Durbin, are in on whatever may have happened to Travis and are helping their son to cover it up. There’s been talk about a potential stabbing but so far that’s just a theory based on the characteristics Doc observed on the bones at autopsy.

The team takes a divide-and-conquer approach, with Warrick opting to survey the backyard while Catherine and Sara pick up on the second floor, and Grissom hangs with the bomb squad lieutenant, processing the garage, which appears to be some kind of makeshift explosives workshop.

Searching his chosen space, Grissom starts to sketch a mental image of the type of family that they’re dealing with. He hasn’t himself spoken to the Durbins, but he has heard from Brass that Mr. Durbin is domineering and Mrs. Durbin is an enabler, an assessment certainly supported by the uneven distribution of his and hers items in the garage. For every one old sewing machine or stack of heirloom quilts, there are a dozen tackle boxes filled with washers, screws, and other bomb-making paraphernalia. The son, Owen, is even less represented than the mother. Aside from a rusted bike in the corner, there is nothing in the garage to suggest that a child lives in the house. Dangerous items are within reach everywhere. The place is a literal minefield. Clearly, the father’s interests prevail without regard for how they might impact the other members of the household.

Grissom is still mulling the family psychology when he kneels to search behind the outdoor fridge and discovers a cardboard box filled with knives of various lengths and blade types. There must be twenty of them in all, and it isn’t lost on Grissom that one of them could be the murder weapon. He photographs and then tries to extricate the box using a folded latex glove for a barrier. But from his current angle, he can’t get a good grip on the box lip, and the harder he tugs, the more firmly it becomes wedged between the fridge and wall. The garage swelters, and just as the thought enters his mind that he will probably need to move the fridge in order to recover the knives, the bomb squad lieutenant speaks to him.

“Don’t touch a thing. Get out now.”

His voice is smooth but taut like a pulled rope. He stands stock-still in front of the fridge, which he has opened, staring at its contents, which Grissom, from his place on the floor, cannot see. While Grissom knows he promised to exit the premises if the lieutenant gave the word, he also knows that this box of knives may make the difference between solving the case and not.

“Uh, I think I have some evidence back here,” he says, hoping that the lieutenant will permit him to proceed as long as he moves slowly.

“Clear out _now_ ,” the lieutenant commands.

There is no room for questions.

The lieutenant helps Grissom to rise without rattling the fridge, then leads him swiftly from the garage, explaining as they go that the fridge is filled with jars of liquid explosives, all of which are highly unstable and will likely blow at any moment. Since it would be too dangerous to try to move either the fridge or its contents, the bomb squad is going to have to detonate the liquids on site, in all likelihood destroying the house and everything inside of it.

“You have two minutes to get your people outside with as much evidence as they can carry,” the lieutenant warns. Then, more gravely, “Do not make me have to send anyone in there after you.”

Now the vein in Grissom’s neck throbs again. He thunders into the house at the pace of his heartbeat, moving quicker than he has in years. Warrick is already outside, he knows, but Catherine and Sara are upstairs. He stops on the landing, clinging to the banister as he yells up to them.

“Hey! The garage is packed with liquid explosives. They're gonna detonate in place, so grab what's important and get out now!” He hears scrambling in the hallway at the top of the stairs: high heels moving staccato between carpet and the wooden floor. That’s Catherine complying with his orders immediately. He shouts again. “That means you, too, Sara! Right now!”

Sara’s first instinct will be to prioritize the collection of evidence, but now is not the time for her to be stubborn. If she doesn’t come running within the next ten seconds, he swears to God, he is going to charge upstairs, toss her over his shoulder, and carry her outside kicking and screaming. His heart rides in his throat, probably closer to detonation than the liquids in the garage.

By now Catherine is barreling down the stairs, her kit in her arms and a few packets of evidence jammed haphazardly between her fingers. She doesn’t say anything as she passes by Grissom, but the look she gives him communicates that she isn’t sure whether Sara is coming after her or not.

Outside in the street, there is a cacophony of noise. One of the bomb squad guys is on a bullhorn issuing a warning about the impending detonation. To the best of Grissom’s knowledge, the neighborhood was evacuated hours ago, but the bomb squad isn’t taking any chances, not with civilian lives potentially at stake. Police sirens wail, and people shout as the demolitions crew organizes. Someone calls to Grissom from the front foyer of the house, “Hey, CSI! Move your ass!”

But Grissom doesn’t move, doesn’t breathe—not until finally Sara appears at the top of the stairs, her arms crammed with evidence bags. He rises to meet her on the topmost step, seizing her by the shoulder and steering her down past him so that he is right behind her.

For the fleetest instant, their eyes meet, and he sees that she is afraid, not of him but for her life, and though her fear would never gratify him otherwise, in this circumstance, he feels reflexively glad, because now he knows: She was telling the truth when she said that she doesn’t have a death wish.

He only barely has time to register the look before it is gone, replaced suddenly by something else—another emotion he cannot sufficiently interpret before they are clattering down the stairs and rushing out the front door.

They pass a bomb squad officer who says, “Jesus! That all your guys?” When Grissom gives the okay nod, the officer radios his lieutenant: “All LVPD personnel are secure and accounted for.” They’re shepherded outside the blast area past the perimeter barriers into a makeshift safe zone behind some police cars, bomb squad trucks, rubber cones, and foam dividers. Catherine, Warrick, and a few police dispatchers already wait there for them.

The instant they pass beyond the tape, the bomb squad officer issues a warning: “We go in five. Get low and cover your ears.” Grissom wants to ask him five what—seconds? minutes?—but there’s no time.

The explosion rocks the block before he can say anything.

For an instant, everything is sound and shock, all sensory in every way—too bright, too loud, too fast, too strong. Their eyes close. They fold. The ground beneath their feet shifts as in an earthquake, then shifts back from immediate reverb. Heat flares around their bodies, and fire, smoke, and chemicals suffuse the air in a single overpowering spate of smell and taste. Everyone goes down on one knee. Everyone shudders through their spines.

Grissom, without thinking, covers Sara with his body, shielding her beneath him as they both protect their heads. Sara shrinks in his arms, and he buries his face against her hair.

In the few nanoseconds after the sound barrier has been broken and the air vibrates like a singing goblet halfway filled with wine, he opens his eyes and sees that Warrick has also shielded Catherine, and a veteran police officer his rookie partner. The realization dawns on him that if asked, he could easily explain away his actions here. To gather in close to the person next to you when the sky seems to be falling is a human instinct as ancient at least as Pompeii, so of course he would hold onto Sara, of course when she was beside him.

But he also realizes that sometimes there is what is true and then there is the truth—and the truth here is that holding her wasn’t a matter of convenience or instinct. Though logically he knew that they were safe outside the blast zone, the primal being in him felt itself facing down something with the power to compel and destroy him and in that moment made the conscious choice to reach out and take hold of her, to make her the object of his final thought and action.

Now, with the blast over, they start to rise, and he offers her his hand, another instinct, helping her to her feet. Contrary to his expectation, she doesn’t break the contact immediately once they are upright. With her palm still touching his, she meets his eye. It’s another brief look, something no one else would notice but which catches Grissom and halts him, causing him to wonder if perhaps she is making a conscious choice, too.

In the ensuing minutes, there will be headcounts and protocols, fire containment efforts and damage assessment. The CSIs will have to return to the lab to inventory what they were able to recover from the scene prior to the detonation. They’ll need to plan for how to work the case now that what is in all likelihood their primary crime scene has been reduced to a lot of smoldering rubble.

But for right now, all Grissom can think is that a year and a half ago, there was another explosion in the aftermath of which he lost Sara’s trust. Maybe this explosion can be his second chance, some kind of cosmic do-over.

He can feel her hand trembling in his.

“Are you okay?” he asks her.

“I think so,” she says, breathless.

It feels like a fresh start.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know it's been roughly a million years since my last update, and I apologize. Between my natural slowness and me being very busy in my outside-the-internet life, it's taken me a long time to get this chapter completed. Though I can't necessarily promise the next update will be more timely, I can promise that I won't abandon this story. No matter how long it takes, I'll finish it eventually. Anyway, thanks for being along for the ride.
> 
> In case you are wondering, this chapter covers the events of episodes 05x01 "Viva Las Vegas" and 05x02 "Down the Drain."


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